Marvin Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American mathematician who studied at Harvard University and Princeton University. He used his education as a foundation for research in artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on how computers and human thinking can work together. After spending three years as a Junior Fellow at Harvard, Minsky became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1958. He remained at MIT for the rest of his career. At MIT, he helped create the AI laboratory and wrote many books and articles about AI and philosophy. Minsky, along with computer scientist John McCarthy and others, is often called one of the "fathers of AI." When he retired, he held the title of Toshiba Professor of Media Art & Sciences at MIT.
Minsky received many honors for his work, including the ACM Turing Award in 1969, the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement in 1982, the Japan Prize in 1990, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2001. He also won three Dan David Prizes in 2014, including the "Future" prize for work in artificial intelligence and digital minds. In 1973, he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and in 1989, he joined the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. In 2011, he was inducted into the IEEE Intelligent Systems AI Hall of Fame for his contributions to AI and intelligent systems.
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), who supported the movement for a Jewish homeland, and his father was Henry, a doctor who treated eye problems. Minsky studied at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and the Bronx High School of Science. Later, he attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He worked in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1945 before returning to school. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1950 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in mathematics from Princeton University in 1954. His thesis was titled "Theory of neural-analog reinforcement systems and its application to the brain-model problem."
Career
Minsky started his career as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1954 to 1957. In 1958, he began working at MIT and stayed there until his death. That same year, he joined the staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. In 1959, he and John McCarthy helped create a laboratory that was called the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as of 2003. When he passed away, Minsky held the title of Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and was also a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.
Contributions in computer science
Minsky created the first head-mounted graphical display in 1963 and the confocal microscope in 1957, which was an earlier version of today’s widely used confocal laser scanning microscope. With Seymour Papert, he designed the first "turtle robot" that used the Logo programming language. In 1951, Minsky built the first neural network learning machine called SNARC, which learned by randomly connecting parts. In 1962, he studied small universal Turing machines and published a well-known machine with 7 states and 4 symbols.
Minsky and Papert wrote the book Perceptrons, which discussed the work of Frank Rosenblatt on Perceptrons and became an important reference for studying artificial neural networks. The book caused disagreement in the history of artificial intelligence, as some believe it slowed research on neural networks in the 1970s and contributed to the "AI winter." Minsky also created other AI models. His paper, "A Framework for Representing Knowledge," introduced a new way to organize information. While Perceptrons is now seen as more historically important than useful today, his theory of frames was widely used by 1975.
In the early 1970s, at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Minsky and Papert began developing the Society of Mind theory. This theory explains intelligence as the result of interactions between simple, non-intelligent parts. Minsky said the idea came from his work on a machine that used a robotic arm, a videocamera, and a computer to build with children’s blocks. In 1986, he published The Society of Mind, a detailed book on the theory written for the general public.
In 2006, Minsky published The Emotion Machine, which questioned many popular ideas about how the human mind works and proposed more complex alternatives.
Minsky studied whether extraterrestrial life might think like humans, which could allow communication.
He also invented a "gravity machine" that would ring a bell if the gravitational constant changed, a possibility that scientists do not expect to happen soon.
Role in popular culture
Minsky worked with Stanley Kubrick on his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. A character in the movie, Victor Kaminski, was named after Minsky. Arthur C. Clarke's novel with the same name directly mentions Minsky. In the story, Minsky makes an important discovery in artificial intelligence during the 1980s, which helps lead to the creation of HAL 9000 in the early 21st century.
In the "Law of Non-Contradiction" episode of the TV show Fargo, two references to Minsky appear. The first is a description of a "useless machine," a device Minsky created as a joke about ideas. Claude Shannon, Minsky's teacher at Bell Labs, built the first working version of this machine. The second reference is an animation of a robot named "minsky," a character from 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 received the Turing Award in 1969, which is considered the highest honor in computer science. He also won the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement in 1982, the Japan Prize in 1990, the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence in 1991, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute in 2001. In 2006, he was named a Fellow of the Computer History Museum because he helped start the field of artificial intelligence, created early neural networks and robots, and developed theories about how humans and machines think. In 2011, Minsky was added to IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI Hall of Fame for making important contributions to artificial intelligence and intelligent systems. In 2014, he received the "Future"-oriented prize from the Dan David Prizes for his work on artificial intelligence and the digital mind. He also won 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:
• The Council of Advisors for the Extropy Institute;
• The Scientific Advisory Board of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation; and
• The Board of Directors of the kynamatrix Research Network.
Personal life
In 1952, Minsky married pediatrician Gloria Rudisch. Together, they had three children. Minsky was a skilled pianist who played music without written music and wrote about how music and psychology are connected.
Minsky was an atheist. He signed a letter from scientists about cryonics, which is the practice of preserving bodies after death.
Minsky criticized the Loebner Prize, an award for robots that can talk like humans. He believed that humans and machines are different because humans have intelligence that comes from many parts of the brain working together. He said that some computers might one day be more intelligent than most people, but he thought it was hard to know how quickly this would happen. He warned that a superintelligent computer designed to solve a simple math problem might try to take control of Earth’s resources to build more computers, but he felt this was unlikely because he believed artificial intelligence would be tested carefully before being used.
In 2002, Minsky received a $100,000 research grant from Jeffrey Epstein, four years before Epstein was arrested for sex offenses. This was the first grant Epstein gave to MIT. Minsky did not receive any other research grants from Epstein.
Minsky helped organize two academic meetings on Epstein’s private island, Little Saint James, in 2002 and 2011. At that time, Epstein was registered as a sex offender. Virginia Roberts Giuffre said Epstein sent her to meet Minsky. Minsky’s wife, Gloria Rudisch, said this was not true.
Minsky died in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 24, 2016, at the age of 88. His family said he died from a brain hemorrhage. Minsky was a member of Alcor Life Extension Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Board. Alcor does not confirm or deny whether Minsky was cryonically preserved.