111–120 of 188 posts
Interesting 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...
Minsky used to give talks at the annual Boskone Science Fiction Convention. I heard several and enjoyed them greatly, he was an entertaining speaker.
As a grad student, I remember shooting the bull with Minsky and Hillis (1983). The CIA had offices across the hall and we were discussing how we might grab one of their bags of shredded documents and use a computer to piece together all the fragments by hashing the pattern of edge fragments on each piece.
http://archive.darpa.mil/shredderchallenge/
And, come to think of it, a variation was in the novel Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge.
On top of his work, Minsky taught me that you should meet your idols. If they're worth it you walk away enriched and invigorated.
Interesting 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...
I met Minsky once in February 1987, at a rally in Las Vegas to protest the Nevada Test Site.. A lot of famous people (Carl Sagan, Barbara Boxer, Tom Downey, Ramsey Clark, Martin Sheen, Kris Kristofferson) were there, but I'd gone to meet Minsky. I had taken along a (quite early) copy of the GNU Emacs manual. The FSF was selling them, but I'd put this one together myself. Running TeX on the texinfo source, converting…
One 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.
My father had a book by Minsky which I swiped from his bookshelf and read cover to cover. I can't for the life of me remember the title but looking over his bibliography I think it was this one. This book, if indeed it was this one, had a big impact on my younger self, though I'm ashamed of two things now: 1) I can't remember exactly what it was about it that affected me so, and 2) I don't know where the book is! I d…
Chapter 3 talks about McCulloch-Pitts.
I remember being impressed with chapter 14 ("very simple bases for computability") as a kid. Finding UTMs with minimal number of states etc. are great riddles. I also fondly remember the discussion of the halting problem and related problems ("does program P output X") in chapter 8. This was my first introduction to this procedure and Minsky made the idea of reducing one problem to another totally straightforward. Many years later I realized that not a few CS students find these ideas confusing.
In 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?
I met Minsky once in February 1987, at a rally in Las Vegas to protest the Nevada Test Site.. A lot of famous people (Carl Sagan, Barbara Boxer, Tom Downey, Ramsey Clark, Martin Sheen, Kris Kristofferson) were there, but I'd gone to meet Minsky. I had taken along a (quite early) copy of the GNU Emacs manual. The FSF was selling them, but I'd put this one together myself. Running TeX on the texinfo source, converting…
Interesting. But I wonder, was it a coincidence that you had the manual with you in Honolulu ? Or do you take the manual with you everywhere you go ? :)
While he was in Hawaii, I also paid to fly him to the "Big Island" (Hawaii) to speak with people (mostly astronomers and their children, though some people drove up from Hilo.)
https://blogs.oracle.com/barton808/entry/my_travels_in_hawai...
Since I was paying for his ticket, I knew he would be at the airport.
I lived in Hawaii at the time.
Back in Las Vegas (where I lived at the time), the book, and emacs, were new to me. I took it to read then.