Marvin Minsky

Marvin Lee Minsky (born August 9, 1927) is an

American cognitive scientist in the eld of articial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts
on AI and philosophy.[10][11][12]

built, in 1951, the rst randomly wired neural network

learning machine, SNARC.
Minsky wrote the book Perceptrons (with Seymour Papert), which became the foundational work in the analysis of articial neural networks. This book is the center of a controversy in the history of AI, as some claim
it to have had great importance in driving research away
from neural networks in the 1970s, and contributing to
the so-called AI winter. He also founded several other
famous AI models. His book A framework for representing knowledge created a new paradigm in programming. While his Perceptrons is now more a historical than practical book, the theory of frames is in wide
use.[19] Minsky has also written on the possibility that
extraterrestrial life may think like humans, permitting
communication.[20] He was an adviser[21] on the movie
2001: A Space Odyssey and is referred to in the movie
and book:

Biography

Marvin Lee Minsky was born in New York City to an eye

surgeon and a Jewish activist,[13] where he attended The
Fieldston School and the Bronx High School of Science.
He later attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He served in the US Navy from 1944 to 1945.
He holds a BA in mathematics from Harvard (1950) and
a PhD in mathematics from Princeton (1954).[14][15] He
has been on the MIT faculty since 1958. In 1959[16] he
and John McCarthy founded what is now known as the
MIT Computer Science and Articial Intelligence Laboratory. He is currently the Toshiba Professor of Media
Arts and Sciences, and Professor of electrical engineering
and computer science.

Probably no one would ever know this;

it did not matter. In the 1980s, Minsky and
Good had shown how neural networks could
be generated automaticallyself replicated
in accordance with any arbitrary learning
program. Articial brains could be grown by
a process strikingly analogous to the development of a human brain. In any given case,
the precise details would never be known, and
even if they were, they would be millions of
times too complex for human understanding.
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey[22]

Isaac Asimov described Minsky as one of only two people

he would admit were more intelligent than he was, the
other being Carl Sagan.[17]

In the early 1970s at the MIT Articial Intelligence Lab,

Minsky and Seymour Papert started developing what
came to be called The Society of Mind theory. The theory attempts to explain how what we call intelligence
could be a product of the interaction of non-intelligent
parts. Minsky says that the biggest source of ideas about
the theory came from his work in trying to create a machine that uses a robotic arm, a video camera, and a com3D prole of a coin (partial) measured with a modern confocal puter to build with childrens blocks. In 1986, Minsky
published The Society of Mind, a comprehensive book on
white light microscope.
the theory which, unlike most of his previously published
Minskys inventions include the rst head-mounted work, was written for a general audience.
graphical display (1963) and the confocal micro- In November 2006, Minsky published The Emotion Mascope[4][18] (1957, a predecessor to todays widely used chine, a book that critiques many popular theories of
confocal laser scanning microscope). He developed, with how human minds work and suggests alternative theories,
Seymour Papert, the rst Logo "turtle". Minsky also often replacing simple ideas with more complex ones.
1

Recent drafts of the book are freely available from his

webpage.[23]

Awards and aliations

REFERENCES

In the days when Sussman was a novice,

Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at
the PDP-6.
What are you doing?" asked Minsky.
I am training a randomly wired neural net to
play Tic-tac-toe, Sussman replied.
Why is the net wired randomly?" asked Minsky.
I do not want it to have any preconceptions of
how to play, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked
his teacher.
So that the room will be empty.
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.[1]

Minsky won the Turing Award in 1969, the Japan Prize in

1990, the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence in 1991,
and the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute in 2001.[24] In 2006, he was inducted as a Fellow
of the Computer History Museum for co-founding the
eld of articial intelligence, creating early neural networks and robots, and developing theories of human and
machine cognition.[25] In 2011, Minsky was inducted
into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AIs Hall of Fame for the
signicant contributions to the eld of AI and intelli1. ^
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/
gent systems.[26][27] In 2014, Minsky won the Dan David
koans.html#id3141241
Prize in the eld of "Articial Intelligence, the Digital
Mind.[28] He was also awarded with the 2013 BBVA Minsky is an atheist[35] and has signed the Scientists
Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Infor- Open Letter on Cryonics.[36]
mation and Communication Technologies category[29]
Marvin Minsky is aliated with the following organizations:
United States National Academy of Engineering

[1] Marvin Lee Minsky at the Mathematics Genealogy

Project

United States National Academy of Sciences

[2] Marvin Lee Minsky at the AI Genealogy Project.

Extropy Institute's Council of Advisors[30]

Alcor Life Extension Foundation's Scientic Advisory Board[31]
kynamatrix Research
Directors[32]

Network's

Board

of

Minsky is a critic of the Loebner Prize.[33][34]

4 References

Personal life

[3] Minsky, M. (1961).

Steps toward Articial Intelligence.
Proceedings of the IRE 49: 81.
doi:10.1109/JRPROC.1961.287775.
[4] Minsky, M. (1988). Memoir on inventing the confocal scanning microscope. Scanning 10 (4): 128138.
doi:10.1002/sca.4950100403.
[5] Pesta, A (12 March 2014). Looking for Something Useful to Do With Your Time? Don't Try This. WSJ. Retrieved 24 March 2014.
[6] Papert, Seymour; Minsky, Marvin Lee (1988). Perceptrons: an introduction to computational geometry. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-63111-3.
[7] Minsky, Marvin Lee (1986). The society of mind. New
York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-671-60740-5. The
rst comprehensive description of the Society of Mind theory of intellectual structure and development. See also The
Society of Mind (CD-ROM version), Voyager, 1996.
[8] Minsky, Marvin Lee (2007). The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Articial Intelligence, and the Future
of the Human Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN
0-7432-7664-7.
[9] Marvin Minsky 2006 Fellow

The Minskytron or Three Position Display running on the

Computer History Museum's PDP-1, 2007

Minsky is an actor in an articial intelligence koan (attributed to his student, Danny Hillis) from the Jargon le:

[10] Marvin Minskys publications indexed by the DBLP Bibliography Server at the University of Trier
[11] List of publications from Microsoft Academic Search
[12] Marvin Minskys publications in Google Scholar

[13] Science in the contemporary world: an encyclopedia

ISBN 1851095241
[14] Minsky, Marvin Lee (1954). Theory of Neural-Analog
Reinforcement Systems and Its Application to the Brain
Model Problem (PhD thesis). Princeton University.
[15] Hillis, Danny; John McCarthy; Tom M. Mitchell; Erik
T. Mueller; Doug Riecken; Aaron Sloman; Patrick Henry
Winston (2007). In Honor of Marvin Minskys Contributions on his 80th Birthday. AI Magazine (Association for
the Advancement of Articial Intelligence) 28 (4): 103
110. Retrieved 2010-11-24.
[16] Horgan, John (November 1993). Prole: Marvin
L. Minsky:
The Mastermind of Articial Intelligence.
Scientic American 269 (5): 1415.
doi:10.1038/scienticamerican1193-35.
[17] Isaac Asimov (1980). In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954-1978. Doubleday/Avon. p.
217,302. ISBN 0-380-53025-2.
[18] The patent for Minskys Microscopy Apparatus was applied for in 1957, and subsequently granted US Patent
Number 3,013,467 in 1961. According to his published
biography on the MIT Media Lab webpage, In 1956,
when a Junior Fellow at Harvard, Minsky invented and
built the rst Confocal Scanning Microscope, an optical
instrument with unprecedented resolution and image quality.
[19] Unknown (1975). Minskys frame system theory. Proceedings of the 1975 workshop on Theoretical issues in natural language processing - TINLAP '75. pp. 104116.
doi:10.3115/980190.980222.
[20] Minsky, Marvin (April 1985). Communication with
Alien Intelligence. BYTE. p. 127. Retrieved 27 October 2013.
[21] For more, see this interview, https://mitpress.mit.edu/
e-books/Hal/chap2/two3.html
[22] Clarke, Arthur C.: 2001: A Space Odyssey
[23] Marvin Minskys Home Page
[24] Marvin Minsky - The Franklin Institute Awards - Laureate Database. Franklin Institute. Retrieved on March 25,
2008.
[25] CHM. Marvin Minsky CHM Fellow Award Winner.
Retrieved March 30, 2015.
[26] AIs Hall of Fame (PDF). IEEE Intelligent Systems
(IEEE Computer Society) 26 (4): 515.
2011.
doi:10.1109/MIS.2011.64.

[29] MIT articial intelligence, robotics pioneer feted: Award

celebrates Minskys career. BostonGlobe.com. August
24, 2011. Retrieved January 18, 2014.
[30] Extropy Institute Directors & Advisors
[31] Alcor: Scientic Advisory Board
[32] Minsky joins kynamatrix board of directors
[33] Minsky -thread.html
[34] Salon.com Technology | Articial stupidity
[35] Leon M. Lederman, Judith A. Scheppler (2001). Marvin Minsky: Mind Maker. Portraits of Great American Scientists. Prometheus Books. p. 74. ISBN
9781573929325. Another area where he goes against
the ow is in his spiritual beliefs. As far as religion is
concerned, hes a conrmed atheist. I think it [religion]
is a contagious mental disease. . . . The brain has a need
to believe it knows a reason for things.
[36] Scientists Open Letter on Cryonics, Cryonics Institute, retrieved 2015-04-15

5 External links
Oral history interview with Marvin Minsky at
Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis. Minsky describes articial intelligence (AI) research at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT). Topics include: the work of
John McCarthy; changes in the MIT research laboratories with the advent of Project MAC; research in
the areas of expert systems, graphics, word processing, and time-sharing; variations in the Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA) attitude toward
AI.
Oral history interview with Terry Winograd at
Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis. Winograd describes his work in computer science, linguistics, and articial intelligence
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
discussing the work of Marvin Minsky and others.
Scientist on the Set: An Interview with Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky Playlist Appearance on WMBRs
Dinnertime Sampler radio show November 26, 2003
Consciousness Is A Big Suitcase: A talk with Marvin Minsky

[27] IEEE Computer Society Magazine Honors Articial Intelligence Leaders. DigitalJournal.com. August 24,
2011. Retrieved September 18, 2011. Press release
source: PRWeb (Vocus).

Video of Minsky speaking at the International Conference on Complex Systems, hosted by the New
England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI)

[28] Dan David prize 2014 winners. May 15, 2014. Retrieved May 20, 2014.

The Emotion Universe": Video with Marvin Minsky

5
Marvin Minskys thoughts on the Fermi Paradox at
the Transvisions 2007 conference
Health, population and the human mind: Marvin
Minsky talk at the TED conference
The Society of Mind on MIT OpenCourseWare
Marvin Minsky tells his life story at Web of Stories
(video)

EXTERNAL LINKS

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