We just lost a giant.
Hard to imagine someone more black bar worthy for Hacker News, hope we have one up soon.
Marvin Minsky dies at 88
21–30 of 188 posts
Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#22Interesting fact: Minsky is an Alcor member[1], so he's probably being cryopreserved right now. Though if he died from a cerebral hemorrhage, I'm not sure how well they'll be able to preserve his brain. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcor_Life_Extension_Foundatio...
One can hope that they'll make the attempt regardless. Alcor's position is to carry out their directive from a member regardless of third party opinions on viability where they can, as having the reputation for doing this minimizes the very real problem of interference from family members (for reasons economic, religious, etc). Also it is very hard to say at the time (as time is critical) how much damage is done via…
Agreed. Not trying guarantees failure; trying leaves some possibility of success.
Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#23We just lost a giant. Hard to imagine someone more black bar worthy for Hacker News, hope we have one up soon.
I hope not. The black bar has become a meaningless exercise in political posturing.
Edit: allow me to clarify - just having to choose whether or not someone is "black bar worthy" is distasteful. Ian Murdock didn't get a black bar that I can recall, and I don't remember seeing one since then, even though other people relevant to the community have died. Are we to expect someone to change the color of the bar every time a death in the tech community occurs, and how to we judge relevance in that regard?
No, it's an arbitrary gesture that doesn't really honor anything or anyone. It just gives people something to argue about. Why did someone get a black bar and someone else didn't? Why was this person deserving of it, and not that person? It's best to just remove it altogether.
Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#24In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe", Sussman replied. "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher…
It is now several decades later.
Do TensorFlow/CNN builders use random initial configurations, or custom designed stuctures?
Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#25Interesting fact: Minsky is an Alcor member[1], so he's probably being cryopreserved right now. Though if he died from a cerebral hemorrhage, I'm not sure how well they'll be able to preserve his brain. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcor_Life_Extension_Foundatio...
Was his cerebral hemorrhage a sudden/unpredictable death? If not, I'm surprised he didn't first relocate to cooperative hospice care in Scottsdale near Alcor to cryopreserve himself before damage became (possibly) irreversible.
Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#26In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe", Sussman replied. "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher…
I always loved this TED talk of his
Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#27In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe", Sussman replied. "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher…
It is now several decades later. Do TensorFlow/CNN builders use random initial configurations, or custom designed stuctures?
Usually random drawn from a certain distribution (ex: Gaussian with std. deviation 0.001, or a std. deviation dependent on the number of input/output units (Xavier initialization)).
For some tasks, you may wish to initialize using a network that was already trained on a different dataset, if you have reason to believe the new training task is similar to the previous task.
Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#28I had the chance to walk with Marvin Minsky down a hallway once, and I asked him what he thought of Bayesian reasoning. He said that it seemed to him like it was still part of a general trend away from tackling the central problem in AI. I said I didn't think so, but he seemed tired so I didn't try to go into detail.
There's an urban legend that I once got into a fistfight with Marvin Minsky, which does about as well as anything to illustrate the crazy, crazy things that people have been known to believe about me.
We have temporarily misplaced a great mind. See you later, Professor Minsky.
Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#29Isaac Asimov: "The only people I ever met whose intellects surpassed my own were Carl Sagan and Marvin Minsky."
That's high praise, although I guess he never met von Neumann.
Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#30Admin, can we get a black bar for this? Marvin Minsky is widely referred to as the "Founding Father of AI."
I can't imagine who deserves a black bar if Minsky doesn't, unless a grey bar would be more appropriate (Minsky was signed up for cryonics with Alcor, so he's not dead dead.)