MIT Artificial Intelligence (AI) pioneer Marvin Minsky died at the age of 88 on January 24th in Boston.
See this EE Times blog post for a good summary.
Marvin Minsky’s participation in the 1956 Dartmouth Conference along with John McCarthy, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon gave rise to the term artificial intelligence. While considerable progress has been made in the domain of machine intelligence, Minsky’s book The Emotion Machine deals with some of the more recalcitrant aspects of human-level intelligence.
His work ranged widely, including early work in neural networks (perceptrons) or connectionism and symbolic or classical AI including expert systems. I took university classes in classical AI and enjoyed experimenting with neural networks in the 90s, but my knowledge representation Master’s thesis was very much in the symbolic camp.
Minsky provided advice for the movie 2001: A Space Odessey regarding the delusional HAL 9000 computer. He made this remark about the film:
Kubrick’s vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke’s is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.
I’ll end with more Minsky quotes that provide some insight into this influential man’s thought processes. I particularly like the final tongue-in-cheek comment.
No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it’s doing; but most of the time, we aren’t either.
If you just have a single problem to solve, then fine, go ahead and use a neural network. But if you want to do science and understand how to choose architectures, or how to go to a new problem, you have to understand what different architectures can and cannot do.
I believed in realism, as summarized by John McCarthy’s comment to the effect that if we worked really hard, we’d have an intelligent system in from four to four hundred years.
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