Dr. Minsky was a Harvard classmate and friend of my teenaged best friend's father. While in high school, I had the privilege of visiting MIT with my friend and his father, where, among other things, we met Dr. Minsky in his lab and later visited with Dr. Minsky and his teenaged son in his home. We talked about religion, artificial intelligence and music. He was the first Deist I'd ever met. At that time, Dr. Minsky was "mad at G-d" for only creating two charges of electricity instead of three, because Dr. Minsky could have done so much more with three.
RIP
http://ift.tt/1NxqY74
The Washington Post
Speaking of Science
Marvin Minsky, 1927-2016
By Joel Achenbach January 25 at 7:58 PM
Marvin Minsky, a legendary cognitive scientist who pioneered the field of artificial intelligence, died Sunday at the age of 88. His death was announced by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, who distributed an email to his colleagues:
You get a sense of his storied and varied career from his home page at MIT:
In 1951 he built the SNARC, the first neural network simulator. His other inventions include mechanical arms, hands and other robotic devices, the Confocal Scanning Microscope, the “Muse” synthesizer for musical variations (with E. Fredkin), and one of the first LOGO “turtles”. A member of the NAS, NAE and Argentine NAS, he has received the ACM Turing Award, the MIT Killian Award, the Japan Prize, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, the Rank Prize and the Robert Wood Prize for Optoelectronics, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal.
He and his wife Gloria, a psychologist, welcomed a Post reporter into their home last spring.
Gloria recalled her first conversation with Marvin, more than six decades ago: “He said he wanted to know about how the brain worked. I thought he is either very wise or very dumb. Fortunately it turned out to be the former.”
Marvin and Gloria married in 1952, and spent most of the years since in the same house. Their home became a repository for all manner of artifacts and icons. The place could easily merit status as a national historical site.
They showed me the bongos that physicist Richard Feynman liked to play when he visited. Looming over the bongos was 1950s-vintage robot, which was literally straight out of the imagination of novelist Isaac Asimov — he was another pal who would drop in for the Minsky parties back in the day. There was a trapeze hanging over the middle of the room, and over to one side there was a vintage jukebox. Their friends included science-fiction writers Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.
As a young scientist, Marvin Minsky lunched with Albert Einstein but couldn’t understand him because of his German accent. He had many conversations with the computer genius John Von Neumann, of whom he said:
Minsky said it was Alan Turing who brought respectability to the idea that machines could someday think.
“There were science-fiction people who made similar predictions, but no one took them seriously because their machines became intelligent by magic. Whereas Turing explained how the machines would work,” he said.
There were institutions back in the day that were eager to invest in intelligent machines.
“The 1960s seems like a long time ago, but this miracle happened in which some little pocket of the U.S. naval research organization decided it would support research in artificial intelligence and did in a very autonomous way. Somebody would come around every couple of years and ask if we had enough money,” he said — and flashed an impish smile.
But money wasn’t enough.
“If you look at the big projects, they didn’t have any particular goals,” he said. “IBM had big staffs doing silly things.”
But what about IBM’s much-hyped Watson (cue the commercial with Bob Dylan)? Isn’t that artificial intelligence?
“I wouldn’t call it anything. An ad hoc question-answering machine.”
Was he disappointed at the progress so far?
“Yes. It’s interesting how few people understood what steps you’d have to go through. They aimed right for the top and they wasted everyone’s time,” he said.
Are machines going to become smarter than human beings, and if so, is that a good thing?
“Well, they’ll certainly become faster. And there’s so many stories of how things could go bad, but I don’t see any way of taking them seriously because it’s pretty hard to see why anybody would install them on a large scale without a lot of testing."
RIP
http://ift.tt/1NxqY74
Spoiler:
The Washington Post
Speaking of Science
Marvin Minsky, 1927-2016
By Joel Achenbach January 25 at 7:58 PM
Marvin Minsky, a legendary cognitive scientist who pioneered the field of artificial intelligence, died Sunday at the age of 88. His death was announced by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, who distributed an email to his colleagues:
With great great sadness, I have to report that Marvin Minsky died last night. The world has lost one of its greatest minds in science. As a founding faculty member of the Media Lab he brought equal measuresmetxx humour and deep thinking, always seeing the world differently. He taught us that the difficult is often easy, but the easy can be really hard.In 1956, when the very idea of a computer was only a couple of decades old, Minsky attended a two-month symposium at Dartmouth that is considered the founding event in the field of artificial intelligence. Minsky would go on to write seminal books — including “Perceptrons,” “The Society of Mind” and “The Emotion Machine” — that colleagues to this day consider essential to understanding the challenges in creating machine intelligence.
You get a sense of his storied and varied career from his home page at MIT:
In 1951 he built the SNARC, the first neural network simulator. His other inventions include mechanical arms, hands and other robotic devices, the Confocal Scanning Microscope, the “Muse” synthesizer for musical variations (with E. Fredkin), and one of the first LOGO “turtles”. A member of the NAS, NAE and Argentine NAS, he has received the ACM Turing Award, the MIT Killian Award, the Japan Prize, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, the Rank Prize and the Robert Wood Prize for Optoelectronics, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal.
He and his wife Gloria, a psychologist, welcomed a Post reporter into their home last spring.
Gloria recalled her first conversation with Marvin, more than six decades ago: “He said he wanted to know about how the brain worked. I thought he is either very wise or very dumb. Fortunately it turned out to be the former.”
Marvin and Gloria married in 1952, and spent most of the years since in the same house. Their home became a repository for all manner of artifacts and icons. The place could easily merit status as a national historical site.
They showed me the bongos that physicist Richard Feynman liked to play when he visited. Looming over the bongos was 1950s-vintage robot, which was literally straight out of the imagination of novelist Isaac Asimov — he was another pal who would drop in for the Minsky parties back in the day. There was a trapeze hanging over the middle of the room, and over to one side there was a vintage jukebox. Their friends included science-fiction writers Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.
As a young scientist, Marvin Minsky lunched with Albert Einstein but couldn’t understand him because of his German accent. He had many conversations with the computer genius John Von Neumann, of whom he said:
“He always welcomed me, and we’d start taking about something, automata theory, or computation theory. The phone would ring every now and then and he’d pick it up and say, several times, ‘I’m sorry, but I never discuss non-technical matters.’ I remember thinking, someday I’ll do that. And I don’t think I ever did.”
Minsky said it was Alan Turing who brought respectability to the idea that machines could someday think.
“There were science-fiction people who made similar predictions, but no one took them seriously because their machines became intelligent by magic. Whereas Turing explained how the machines would work,” he said.
There were institutions back in the day that were eager to invest in intelligent machines.
“The 1960s seems like a long time ago, but this miracle happened in which some little pocket of the U.S. naval research organization decided it would support research in artificial intelligence and did in a very autonomous way. Somebody would come around every couple of years and ask if we had enough money,” he said — and flashed an impish smile.
But money wasn’t enough.
“If you look at the big projects, they didn’t have any particular goals,” he said. “IBM had big staffs doing silly things.”
But what about IBM’s much-hyped Watson (cue the commercial with Bob Dylan)? Isn’t that artificial intelligence?
“I wouldn’t call it anything. An ad hoc question-answering machine.”
Was he disappointed at the progress so far?
“Yes. It’s interesting how few people understood what steps you’d have to go through. They aimed right for the top and they wasted everyone’s time,” he said.
Are machines going to become smarter than human beings, and if so, is that a good thing?
“Well, they’ll certainly become faster. And there’s so many stories of how things could go bad, but I don’t see any way of taking them seriously because it’s pretty hard to see why anybody would install them on a large scale without a lot of testing."
RIP Marvin Minsky