Minsky helped design one of the coolest musical gadgets I've ever come across, the Triadex Muse. Being a sort of self-generative music box, Minsky imagined a future where families would gather around such musical machines instead of turning to boring old television for their entertainment and relaxation.
Marvin Minsky dies at 88
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Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#62I think Minsky was the last living giant of AI that attended the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, which many cite as being the beginning of NLP, computer vision, machine learning, etc. Sad news...
More than an attendee, he was one of the proposers.
The proposal:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmou...
Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#63I 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…
I keep thinking about an article I read a couple of years ago about the two schools of thought in AI: the now popular Conventional AI and (I believe) Computational AI. The article was mainly about the lead proponent of computational AI and how, after he helped give birth to the AI field, he was in effect being ostracised because he didn't think conventional AI should be considered "intelligence" as we generally think of it. I'm paraphrasing of course but I'm wondering if Marvin Minsky was the subject of that article? It has been nagging me for a couple of months now and I just don't remember where did I read it or the name of the subject.
Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#64One of my earliest exposures to CS was his Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines. "Communication with Alien Intelligence" is another favorite of mine. The idea of enumerating all possible Turing Machines and looking for ones that do something meaningful is brilliant.
Is the set of all turing machines finite?
No, but they can be put in a 1-1 mapping with the integers, making them countably infinite.
Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#65One of my earliest exposures to CS was his Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines. "Communication with Alien Intelligence" is another favorite of mine. The idea of enumerating all possible Turing Machines and looking for ones that do something meaningful is brilliant.
Is the set of all turing machines finite?
No, but it only needs to be countable, by my understanding.
Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#66Interesting 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.
And spend his last days away from his friends, family, and colleagues, away from his wonderful house and his piano? No, I think that even with foreknowledge he would have chosen to die in Boston.
Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#67Isaac Asimov: "The only people I ever met whose intellects surpassed my own were Carl Sagan and Marvin Minsky."
Minsky's Society of Mind lectures are online, thankfully - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pb3z2w9gDg .
In one of the lectures, Minsky told a story about how when he was at Princeton, Oppenheimer invited him to lunch. When Oppenheimer brought Minsky to the lunch, there were two other people there - Gödel and Einstein. Talk about brainpower, that must have been an interesting table conversation.
Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#68In 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYsTv-ap3XQ
This is not the Prof Minsky I remember from 1970s where I was a MIT student. His mind was laser sharp then and could drill into the core of any problem.
Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty egotistical to frame it that way of Asimov.
There are a bunch of adjectives I would use to describe Asimov, and egotistical is so far down the list I'd get bored listing them before I got to it. It seems likely to be a realistic and honest self-assessment, on the basis of the breadth, depth, and foresight, of Asimov's written work. If you're Usain Bolt, is it egotistical to say, "I'm probably the fastest runner in the world?" Why is intellect so much different…
I don't think bolt could say that. He'll be in the very top (for certain kinds of metrics), but to say #1? That presumes you know your rank compared to 8B+ people.
I would have preferred Asimov to say something like "Sagan and minsky are the brightest minds I've encountered in my life." And if you think Asimov is super smart, then you'll respect Sagan and Minsky that much more. And you'll respect Asimov too for not being so egotistical. It doesn't even matter if it's actually true or not.
Minsky, in my experience, demonstrated humility when talking with or listening to him. For that I gain admiration beyond the talent.
Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty egotistical to frame it that way of Asimov.
You are not Isaac Asimov. Therefore you cannot know his mind. So maybe he wasn't boasting at all.
If that's true, then he needs to work on his language because it's easily interpreted that way. Either that or the GP needs to expand the quote.