Difference between revisions of "Marvin Minsky"

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Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.

Contributions to computer science

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.

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.

Minsky has also written on the possibility that extraterrestrial life may think like humans, permitting communication.

He was an adviser on Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey; one of the film's characters, Victor Kaminski, was named in Minsky's honor and Minsky himself is mentioned in the movie and in Arthur C. Clarke's tie-in novel:

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.

See also

External links

• Marvin Minsky @ Wikipedia