Marvin Minsky

Template:Short description Template:Refimprove Marvin Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American mathematician who was Harvard- and Princeton-trained and used his training as a foundation for research in cognitive and computer science aspects of artificial intelligence (AI). After three years as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, Minsky joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1958 and spent the rest of his career at that institution. There, he co-founded MIT's AI laboratory, among other initiatives, and wrote extensively about AI and philosophy. He, computer scientist John McCarthy, and others have been considered "fathers of AI".Template:NoteTag At the time he was made emeritus, Minsky was the Toshiba Professor of Media Art & Sciences at MIT.

Minsky received many accolades and honors for his work, including the ACM Turing Award in 1969, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1982, the Japan Prize in 1990, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2001, and of the past-present-future trio of Dan David Prizes in 2014, the "Future"-oriented prize for "Artificial Intelligence, the Digital Mind". He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1973 and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 1989, and was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI Hall of Fame for contributions to AI and intelligent systems in 2011.

Early life and education

Marvin Lee Minsky was born on August 9, 1927, into a Jewish family in New York City. His mother was Fannie (Reiser), a Zionist activist, and his father was Henry, an eye surgeon. Minsky attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and the Bronx High School of Science. He later attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1945 before returning to his education and earning a A.B. in mathematics from Harvard University (1950) and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University (1954). His doctoral dissertation was titled "Theory of neural-analog reinforcement systems and its application to the brain-model problem".

Career

Minsky began his academic career as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1954 to 1957. He joined the MIT faculty in 1958 and remained there until his death. He joined the staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1958; a year later, he and John McCarthy initiated what was, as of 2003Template:Dated maintenance category (articles), named the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

At the time of his death, Minsky was the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences as well as professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

Contributions in computer science

File:Confocal measurement of 1-euro-star 3d and euro.png

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)Template:Third party inline and the confocal microscopeTemplate:Third party inlineTemplate:NoteTag (1957, a predecessor to today's widely used confocal laser scanning microscope). With Seymour Papert, he developed the first Logo programming language-driven "turtle robot". In 1951, Minsky built the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, SNARC. In 1962, he worked on small universal Turing machines and published his well-known 7-state, 4-symbol machine.Template:Better source

Minsky and Papert's book Perceptrons attacked the work of Frank Rosenblatt on Perceptrons and became the foundational work in the analysis of artificial neural networks. The book is the center of a controversy in the history of AI, as some claim it greatly discouraged research on neural networks in the 1970s and contributed to the so-called "AI winter". Minsky also developed several other AI models. His paper, "A Framework for Representing Knowledge,"Template:Full created a new paradigm in knowledge representation. Perceptrons is now viewed as of more historical than practical interest, but his theory of frames was in wide use as of 1975.Template:Update inlineTemplate:Full

In the early 1970s, at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Minsky and Papert began to develop what came to be known as the Society of Mind theory. The theory describes intelligence as the possible product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. Minsky said that ideas for the theory came from his work in trying to create a machine that uses a robotic arm, a videocamera, and a computer to build with children's blocks. In 1986, he published The Society of Mind,Template:Full a comprehensive book on the theory which—unlike most of his previously published work—was written for the general public.

In 2006, Minsky published The Emotion Machine, a book that critiques many popular theories of how the human mind works, and suggests alternative theories, often replacing simple ideas with more complex ones.Template:Third party inline

Miscellaneous interests

Minsky examined the possibility that extraterrestrial life may think like humans, thus permitting communication.

Minsky invented a "gravity machine" that rings a bell if the gravitational constant changes, a theoretical possibility not expected to occur in the foreseeable future.

Role in popular culture

Minsky was an adviser to Stanley Kubrick on his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey; one of the movie's characters, Victor Kaminski, was named in Minsky's honor. Arthur C. Clarke's novel of the same name explicitly mentions Minsky. In it, he achieves a crucial breakthrough in artificial intelligence in the then-future 1980s, paving the way for HAL 9000 in the early 21st century:

In the 1980s, Minsky and Good had shown how artificial 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.Template:Full

In "The Law of Non-Contradiction", a season 3 episode of the television anthology series Fargo, at least two allusions to Minsky are made. The first is through the depiction of a "useless machine", a device Minsky invented as a philosophical joke and of which Claude Shannon, Minsky's mentor at Bell Labs, built the first working prototype. The second is through the depiction of the animation of a robot called "minsky", a character in the science fiction novel The Planet Wyh.

Selected bibliography

• 1967 – Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, Prentice-Hall
• 1969 – Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry, MIT Press
• 1986 – The Society of Mind
• 2006 – The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind

Awards and affiliations

Minsky won the Turing Award, "computer science's highest prize", in 1969, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1982, the Japan Prize in 1990, the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence for 1991, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute in 2001. In 2006, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for co-founding the field of artificial intelligence, creating early neural networks and robots, and developing theories of human and machine cognition." In 2011, Minsky was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI Hall of Fame for "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems". In 2014, from the past-present-future trio of Dan David Prizes, Minsky was awarded the "Future"-oriented prize, for "Artificial Intelligence, the Digital Mind". He was also awarded with the 2013 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category.

Minsky was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1973 and to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 1989.

Other organizations with which he was affiliated include:

• Extropy Institute's Council of Advisors;
• Alcor Life Extension Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board; and
• kynamatrix Research Network's Board of Directors.

Media appearances

• Machine Dreams (1988)
• Future Fantastic (1996)

Personal life

File:Minskytron-PDP-1-20070512.jpg

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

In 1952, Minsky married pediatrician Gloria Rudisch; together they had three children. Minsky was a talented improvisational pianist, and published musings on the relations between music and psychology.

Opinions

Minsky was an atheist. He was a signatory to the Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics.

He was a critic of the Loebner Prize for conversational robots, and argued that a fundamental difference between humans and machines is that while humans are machines, they are machines in which intelligence emerges from the interplay of the many unintelligent but semi-autonomous agents the brain comprises. He argued that "somewhere down the line, some computers will become more intelligent than most people", but that it was very hard to predict how fast progress would be. He cautioned that an artificial superintelligence designed to solve an innocuous mathematical problem might decide to assume control of Earth's resources to build supercomputers to help achieve its goal, but believed that such scenarios are "hard to take seriously" because he felt confident that AI would be well tested before being deployed.

Association with Jeffrey Epstein

Minsky received a $100,000 research grant from Jeffrey Epstein in 2002, four years before Epstein's first arrest for sex offenses; it was the first from Epstein to MIT. Minsky received no further research grants from him.

Minsky organized two academic symposia on Epstein's private island Little Saint James, one in 2002 and another in 2011, after Epstein was a registered sex offender. Virginia Roberts Giuffre said Epstein sent her to have sex with Minsky; Minsky's widow, Gloria Rudisch, has denied this.

Death

Minsky died in Boston, Massachusetts on January 24, 2016, aged 88. His family reported that he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Minsky was a member of Alcor Life Extension Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board. Alcor will neither confirm nor deny that Minsky was cryonically preserved.

See also

• List of pioneers in computer science

External links

• Scientist on the Set: An Interview with Marvin Minsky
• Consciousness Is A Big Suitcase: A talk with Marvin Minsky
• Video of Minsky speaking at the International Conference on Complex Systems, hosted by the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI)
• "The Emotion Universe": Video with Marvin Minsky
• Marvin Minsky's 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)
• Marvin Minsky Playlist Appearance on WMBR's Dinnertime Sampler radio show November 26, 2003
• Oral history interview with Marvin Minsky at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Minsky describes artificial 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 artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), discussing the work of Marvin Minsky and others.
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