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Marvin Minsky, Pioneer In Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88 (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader sends word that Marvin Lee Minsky, co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, has died. The Times reports: "Marvin Minsky, who combined a scientist’s thirst for knowledge with a philosopher’s quest for truth as a pioneering explorer of artificial intelligence, work that helped inspire the creation of the personal computer and the Internet, died on Sunday night in Boston. He was 88. Well before the advent of the microprocessor and the supercomputer, Professor Minsky, a revered computer science educator at M.I.T., laid the foundation for the field of artificial intelligence by demonstrating the possibilities of imparting common-sense reasoning to computers."
"Isaac Asimov described Minsky as one of only two people he would admit were more intelligent than he was."
Wow.
I read "society of mind" when it first got translated to Spanish. Lovely, lovely book. Each page was a concept by itself. You could literaly read one page a day an have a complete knwoledge exerience each time.
What always makes me feel uneasy of Minsky was the story that he attacked perceptron showing that they could not solve NOR sending neural nets into a freeze for sevwral years drying founding to them, while at that time it was already known that multilayer nets could solve NOR.
Nowadays deep learning is all the rage...
Sorry about that. It was written on a cell phone and I m not native english speaker.
Nevertheless here goes the story ( http://www.andreykurenkov.com/... )
Marvin Minsky, founder of the MIT AI Lab, and Seymour Papert, director of the lab at the time, were some of the researchers who were skeptical of the hype and in 1969 published their skepticism in the form of rigorous analysis on of the limitations of Perceptrons in a seminal book aptly named Perceptrons. Interestingly, Minksy may have actually been the first researcher to implement a hardware neural net with 1951’s SNARC (Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator) , which preceded Rosenblatt’s work by many years. But the lack of any trace of his work on this system and the critical nature of the analysis in Perceptrons suggests that he concluded this approach to AI was a dead end. The most widely discussed element of this analysis is the elucidation of the limits of a Perceptron - they could not, for instance, learn the simple boolean function XOR because it is not linearly separable. Though the history here is vague, this publication is widely believed to have helped usher in the first of the AI Winters - a period following a massive wave of hype for AI characterized by disillusionment that causes a freeze to funding and publications.
The point here is that Minsky already knew that a multilayer Neural Network could solve XOR, but he nevertheless wrote a paper showing that a single perceptron could not solve XOR, in order to get funding away from perceptrons and towards his own line of investigation.
All that said, I highly recommend his "society of mind" book. The idea to have each single page to explain a simple concept in a complete manner was mind blowing to me at that time. I still havent come across another book written that way.