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| accessdate = 2010-11-24}}</ref> He has been on the [[MIT]] faculty since 1958. In 1959<ref>{{cite journal |author=Horgan, John |date=November 1993 |title= Profile: [[Marvin L. Minsky]]: The Mastermind of Artificial Intelligence|journal=[[Scientific American]] |volume= 269|issue=5 |pages=14–15}}</ref> he and [[John McCarthy (computer scientist)|John McCarthy]] founded what is now known as the [[MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory]]. He is currently the Toshiba Professor of [[Media Arts]] and Sciences, and Professor of [[electrical engineering]] and [[computer science]].
| accessdate = 2010-11-24}}</ref> He has been on the [[MIT]] faculty since 1958. In 1959<ref>{{cite journal |author=Horgan, John |date=November 1993 |title= Profile: [[Marvin L. Minsky]]: The Mastermind of Artificial Intelligence|journal=[[Scientific American]] |volume= 269|issue=5 |pages=14–15}}</ref> he and [[John McCarthy (computer scientist)|John McCarthy]] founded what is now known as the [[MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory]]. He is currently the Toshiba Professor of [[Media Arts]] and Sciences, and Professor of [[electrical engineering]] and [[computer science]].


[[Isaac Asimov]] described Minsky as one of only two people he would admit were more intelligent than he was, the other being [[Carl Sagan]].<ref>{{cite book | title=In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954-1978 | author=Isaac Asimov | page=217,302 | publisher=Doubleday/Avon | year=1980 | isbn= 0-380-53025-2}}</ref>
[[Isaac Asimov]] described Minsky as one of only two people he would admit were more intelligent than he was, the other being Lil B.<ref>{{cite book | title=In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954-1978 | author=Isaac Asimov | page=217,302 | publisher=Doubleday/Avon | year=1980 | isbn= 0-380-53025-2}}</ref>


[[File:Confocal measurement of 1-euro-star 3d and euro.png|thumb|3D profile of a coin (partial) measured with a modern [[confocal microscope|confocal white light microscope]].]]
[[File:Confocal measurement of 1-euro-star 3d and euro.png|thumb|3D profile of a coin (partial) measured with a modern [[confocal microscope|confocal white light microscope]].]]

Revision as of 02:38, 28 February 2014

Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky in 2008
Born
Marvin Lee Minsky

(1927-08-09) August 9, 1927 (age 97)
New York City, United States
NationalityAmerican
Alma materPhillips Academy
Harvard University
Princeton University
Known forArtificial intelligence[3]
Confocal microscope[4]
Useless machine[citation needed]
Triadex Muse[citation needed]
Transhumanism[citation needed]
Perceptrons (book)[5]
Society of Mind[6]
The Emotion Machine[7]
AwardsTuring Award (1969)
Japan Prize (1990)
IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (1991)
Benjamin Franklin Medal (2001)
Scientific career
FieldsCognitive science
InstitutionsMIT
ThesisTheory of Neural-Analog Reinforcement Systems and Its Application to the Brain Model Problem (1954)
Doctoral advisorAlbert W. Tucker[1][2]
Doctoral studentsManuel Blum
Daniel Bobrow
Eugene Charniak
David Dalrymple
Carl Hewitt
Scott Fahlman
Danny Hillis
Benjamin Kuipers
David Levitt
Joel Moses
Bertram Raphael
Gerald Jay Sussman
Ivan Sutherland
Patrick Winston[1]
Websiteweb.media.mit.edu/~minsky

Marvin Lee Minsky (born August 9, 1927) is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.[5][6][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]

Biography

Marvin Lee Minsky was born in New York City to a Jewish family,[17] 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).[18][19] He has been on the MIT faculty since 1958. In 1959[20] he and John McCarthy founded what is now known as the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is currently the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of electrical engineering and computer science.

Isaac Asimov described Minsky as one of only two people he would admit were more intelligent than he was, the other being Lil B.[21]

3D profile of a coin (partial) measured with a modern confocal white light microscope.

Minsky's inventions include the first head-mounted graphical display (1963) and the confocal microscope[4][22] (1957, a predecessor to today's widely used confocal laser scanning microscope). He developed, with Seymour Papert, the first Logo "turtle". Minsky also built, in 1951, the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, SNARC.

Minsky wrote the book Perceptrons (with Seymour Papert), which became the foundational work in the analysis of artificial 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.[citation needed] 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.[23] Minsky has also written on the possibility that extraterrestrial life may think like humans, permitting communication.[24] He was an adviser[25] on the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and is referred to in the movie and book:

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 automatically—self replicated—in accordance with any arbitrary learning program. Artificial 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[26]

In the early 1970s at the MIT Artificial 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 computer to build with children's blocks. In 1986, Minsky published The Society of Mind, a comprehensive book on the theory which, unlike most of his previously published work, was written for a general audience.

In November 2006, Minsky published The Emotion Machine, a book that critiques many popular theories of how human minds work and suggests alternative theories, often replacing simple ideas with more complex ones. Recent drafts of the book are freely available from his webpage.[27]

Awards and affiliations

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.[28] In 2006, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum. In 2011, Minsky was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI's Hall of Fame for the "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems".[29][30] In 2014, he was awarded with the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the information and communication technologies category [31]

Marvin Minsky is affiliated with the following organizations:

Minsky is a critic of the Loebner Prize.[35][36]

Personal life

The Minskytron or "Three Position Display" running on the Computer History Museum's PDP-1, 2007

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

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.[37]

Minsky is an atheist.[38]

References

  1. ^ a b Marvin Lee Minsky at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ^ Marvin Lee Minsky at the AI Genealogy Project.
  3. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1109/JRPROC.1961.287775, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1109/JRPROC.1961.287775 instead.
  4. ^ a b Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1002/sca.4950100403, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1002/sca.4950100403 instead.
  5. ^ a b Papert, Seymour; Minsky, Marvin Lee (1988). Perceptrons: an introduction to computational geometry. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-63111-3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  6. ^ a b Minsky, Marvin Lee (1986). The society of mind. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-671-60740-5. The first comprehensive description of the Society of Mind theory of intellectual structure and development. See also The Society of Mind (CD-ROM version), Voyager, 1996.
  7. ^ Minsky, Marvin Lee (2007). The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-7664-7.
  8. ^ Marvin Minsky at DBLP Bibliography Server Edit this at Wikidata
  9. ^ Marvin Minsky publications indexed by Microsoft Academic
  10. ^ Minsky, Marvin Lee (1967). Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines (Automatic Computation). Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-165563-9.
  11. ^ Semantic Information Processing, MIT Press, 1968. This collection had a strong influence on modern computational linguistics. ISBN 0262516853
  12. ^ Minsky, Marvin Lee (1985). Robotics. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-19414-5. Edited collection of essays about robotics, with Introduction and Postscript by Minsky
  13. ^ Artificial Intelligence, with Seymour Papert, Univ. of Oregon Press, 1972. Out of print.
  14. ^ Communication with Alien Intelligence, 1985
  15. ^ Minsky, Marvin Lee; Harrison, Harry (1993). The turing option. New York: Warner Books. ISBN 0-446-36496-7.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) Science fiction thriller about the construction of a superintelligent robot in the year 2023.
  16. ^ Marvin Minsky's publications in Google Scholar
  17. ^ Science in the contemporary world: an encyclopedia ISBN 1851095241
  18. ^ Minsky, Marvin Lee (1954). Theory of Neural-Analog Reinforcement Systems and Its Application to the Brain Model Problem (PhD thesis). Princeton University.
  19. ^ Hillis, Danny (2007). "In Honor of Marvin Minsky's Contributions on his 80th Birthday". AI Magazine. 28 (4). Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence: 103–110. Retrieved 2010-11-24. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  20. ^ Horgan, John (November 1993). "Profile: Marvin L. Minsky: The Mastermind of Artificial Intelligence". Scientific American. 269 (5): 14–15.
  21. ^ Isaac Asimov (1980). In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954-1978. Doubleday/Avon. p. 217,302. ISBN 0-380-53025-2.
  22. ^ The patent for Minsky's 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 first Confocal Scanning Microscope, an optical instrument with unprecedented resolution and image quality".
  23. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.3115/980190.980222, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.3115/980190.980222 instead.
  24. ^ Minsky, Marvin (April 1985). "Communication with Alien Intelligence". BYTE. p. 127. Retrieved 27 October 2013.
  25. ^ For more, see this interview, http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/Hal/chap2/two3.html
  26. ^ Clarke, Arthur C.: "2001: A Space Odyssey"
  27. ^ Marvin Minsky's Home Page
  28. ^ Marvin Minsky - The Franklin Institute Awards - Laureate Database. Franklin Institute. Retrieved on March 25, 2008.
  29. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1109.2FMIS.2011.64, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with |doi=10.1109.2FMIS.2011.64 instead.
  30. ^ "IEEE Computer Society Magazine Honors Artificial Intelligence Leaders". DigitalJournal.com. August 24, 2011. Retrieved September 18, 2011. Press release source: PRWeb (Vocus).
  31. ^ "MIT artificial intelligence, robotics pioneer feted: Award celebrates Minsky's career". BostonGlobe.com. August 24, 2011. Retrieved January 18, 2014.
  32. ^ Extropy Institute Directors & Advisors
  33. ^ Alcor: Scientific Advisory Board
  34. ^ Minsky joins kynamatrix board of directors
  35. ^ Minsky -thread.html
  36. ^ Salon.com Technology | Artificial stupidity
  37. ^ http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html#id3141241
  38. ^ "Marvin Minsky: Mind Maker". Portraits of Great American Scientists. Prometheus Books. 2001. p. 74. ISBN 9781573929325. Another area where he "goes against the flow" is in his spiritual beliefs. As far as religion is concerned, he's a confirmed atheist. "I think it [religion] is a contagious mental disease. . . . The brain has a need to believe it knows a reason for things. {{cite book}}: Cite uses deprecated parameter |authors= (help)
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