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Marvin Minsky
American cognitive scientist (1927–2016)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Marvin Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016)[1] was a Harvard- and Princeton-trained American mathematician who 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.[13][14][15][16] He, computer scientist John McCarthy,[citation needed] and others have been considered "fathers of AI".[17][note 1] At the time he was made emeritus, Minsky was the Toshiba Professor of Media Art & Sciences at MIT.[18]
August 9, 1927[1]
Princeton University (MA, PhD)
Minsky received many accolades and honors for his work, including the ACM Turing Award in 1969,[1][17] the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1982,[19] the Japan Prize in 1990,[20] the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2001,[21] and of the past-present-future trio of Dan David Prizes in 2014, the "Future"-oriented prize for "Artificial Intelligence, the Digital Mind".[22][23] He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1973[24][25] and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 1989,[18][25] and was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI Hall of Fame for contributions to AI and intelligent systems in 2011.[26]
Early life and education
Marvin Lee Minsky was born on August 9, 1927,[1] into a Jewish family in New York City. His mother was Fannie (Reiser), a Zionist activist, and his father was Henry, an eye surgeon.[27][28][16] Minsky attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School[citation needed] and the Bronx High School of Science.[citation needed] He later attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.[citation needed] He served in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1945[citation needed] before returning to his education and earning a A.B. in mathematics from Harvard University (1950)[citation needed] 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".[29][30][31]
Career
Minsky began his academic career as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1954 to 1957.[32][33] He joined the MIT faculty in 1958 and remained there until his death.[citation needed] He joined the staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1958; a year later, he and John McCarthy initiated what was, as of 2003[update], named the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.[34][35]
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.[citation needed][verification needed]
Contributions in computer science
Minsky's inventions include the first head-mounted graphical display (1963)[25][independent source needed] and the confocal microscope[3][independent source needed][note 2] (1957, a predecessor to today's widely used confocal laser scanning microscope).[citation needed] With Seymour Papert, he developed the first Logo programming language-driven "turtle robot".[citation needed] In 1951, Minsky built the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, SNARC.[citation needed] In 1962, he worked on small universal Turing machines and published his well-known 7-state, 4-symbol machine.[36][better source needed]
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".[37] Minsky also developed several other AI models.[citation needed] His paper, "A Framework for Representing Knowledge,"[38][full citation needed] created a new paradigm in knowledge representation.[according to whom?][citation needed] Perceptrons is now viewed as of more historical than practical interest, but his theory of frames was in wide use as of 1975.[citation needed][needs update][39][full citation needed]
General view
The Belgrade Hand
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.[citation needed] The theory describes intelligence as the possible product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts.[citation needed] 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.[citation needed] In 1986, he published The Society of Mind,[full citation needed] a comprehensive book on the theory which—unlike most of his previously published work[citation needed]—was written for the general public.[citation needed]
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.[40][independent source needed]
Miscellaneous interests
Minsky examined the possibility that extraterrestrial life may think like humans, thus permitting communication.[41]
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.[4]
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.[42][43] 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.[44][full citation needed]
In "The Law of Non-Contradiction", a season 3 episode of the television anthology series Fargo, at least two allusions to Minsky are made.[citation needed] The first is through the depiction of a "useless machine", a device Minsky invented as a philosophical joke[citation needed] and of which Claude Shannon, Minsky's mentor at Bell Labs, built the first working prototype.[45][verification needed] The second is through the depiction of the animation of a robot called "minsky", a character in the science fiction novel The Planet Wyh.[clarification needed][citation needed]
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,[1][17] the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1982,[19] the Japan Prize in 1990,[20] the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence for 1991,[citation needed] and the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute in 2001.[21] 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."[46] In 2011, Minsky was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI Hall of Fame for "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems".[26] 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".[22][23] He was also awarded with the 2013 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category.[47]
Minsky was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1973[24][25] and to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 1989.[18][25]
Other organizations with which he was affiliated include:
- Extropy Institute's Council of Advisors;[48]
- Alcor Life Extension Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board;[49] and
- kynamatrix Research Network's Board of Directors.[50]
Media appearances
- Machine Dreams (1988)
- Future Fantastic (1996)
Personal life
In 1952, Minsky married pediatrician Gloria Rudisch; together they had three children.[51] Minsky was a talented improvisational pianist,[52] and published musings on the relations between music and psychology.[citation needed]
Opinions
Minsky was an atheist.[53] He was a signatory to the Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics.[54]
He was a critic of the Loebner Prize for conversational robots,[55] 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.[1] 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.[56] 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,[57] but believed that such scenarios are "hard to take seriously" because he felt confident that AI would be well tested before being deployed.[58]
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.[59][60]
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.[61] Virginia Roberts Giuffre said Epstein sent her to have sex with Minsky;[62] Minsky's widow, Gloria Rudisch, has denied this.[63]
Death
Minsky died in Boston, Massachusetts on January 24, 2016, aged 88.[64] His family reported that he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.[1] Minsky was a member of Alcor Life Extension Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board.[49] Alcor will neither confirm nor deny that Minsky was cryonically preserved.[65]
See also
Notes
- His being given this moniker is specifically due to his participation in the 1956 Dartmouth workshop that established Artificial Intelligence as an academic field.[according to whom?][citation needed]
- The patent for Minsky's Microscopy Apparatus was applied for in 1957, and subsequently granted US Patent Number 3,013,467 in 1961.[citation needed] According to his published biography on the MIT Media Lab webpage,[full citation needed] "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".[This quote needs a citation]
