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Marvin Minsky dies at 88

nytimes.com

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Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88

#181

Post by kkylin »

dTal wrote: post #178
tarr11 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found this original version copied from this story (original source is a dead link) [1] "So Sussman began working on a program. Not long after, this odd-looking bald guy came over. Sussman figured the guy was going to boot him out, but instead the man sat down, asking, “Hey, what are you doing?” Sussman talked over his program with the man, Marvin Minsky. At one point in the discussion, Sussman told Minsky that he wa…

I had no idea that koan was a (mostly) true story. Thanks a lot for posting.

Yes, I had once asked GJS about that exactly that story, and he confirmed it (though maybe not the exact words).

Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88

#182

Post by dang »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #175
brudgers wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The user dang is the moderator. A charitable reading of his comment would be that dang was relieved that someone else was responding to the subthread in a way consistent with his sense of how people should act on Hacker News. Meta-discussion of the black bar is intellectually uninteresting at best. Off topic in the middle. And disrespectful of people's grief at worst. The least of these is reason enough to downvote.

I know very well that dang is a moderator. I had expected that a moderator would actually consider the site's own guidelines when someone displays what they describe in their own words as "regular aggression with sarcasm"+. + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10973857

My comment was posted before mikeash described his comment that way, so unless you think we should be mind-readers, that's a hindsight fallacy. I never dreamt he was being sarcastic. In fact I still can't read his comment that way—to me it remains a striking expression of the right values of this site.

If I squint, I guess I can see that use of the word "civilized" as a bit aggressive, but really I think Mike was being hyperbolic for effect in his later description.

Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88

#183

Post by bl4ckdu5t »

RIP Marvin. We're glad you've introduced what has become a great topic of interest to us today. AI just started getting even more interesting than ever since late last year and at least he lived to see that what he had started is what's gradually building the future we hope for

Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88

#184

Post by josteink »

EdwardCoffin wrote: post #11
Tossrock wrote: post #4

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…

Danny Hillis: "The first time I met Marvin Minsky: I walked into his office, I was very intimidated. He was sitting there, he was throwing wadded up pieces of paper at a wastebasket across the room, and doing a terrible job of it. He's missing it, they're all falling short. So I watch this for a while. Then he looked up at me and said 'ah! I forgot! It's one half em gee squared!'" - From his talk On Game Software Dev…

Maybe I'm wrong, but that sounds like he was trying to get the formula for kinetic energy, which would be half em vee squared.

Just to be clear: I'm not questioning the story, just the details in the recollection :)

Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88

#185

Post by Scarblac »

areyousure wrote: post #177
Tossrock wrote: post #4

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…

Honest question: What does this koan mean ? Specifically, what is closing one's eyes analogous to in the neural network? What is the recommended alternative action?

Somewhere else is the thread is a closer rendition of how the actual exchange went. Using that, I finally understand the koan:

Closing his eyes did not make the room empty. It made him not know which things were where.

Randomizing the neural network did not remove all the preconceptions from the network. It made him not know what the network's preconceptions were.

Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88

#186

Post by coldtea »

btgeekboy wrote: post #111
ggreer wrote: post #13

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...

Under "Policies and Procedures" it says that he's not only a member, but on the Scientific Advisory Board.

Who knew there was "science" involved in those things.

I mean apart from the technical expertise on freezing etc, the rest is mostly wishful thinking about how such a facility will survive long enough in tact (and the US wont itself go the way of the Assyrian, the Persian, the Roman, the British and other empires, in 1 or 2 centuries time), technical/medical resurrection will be possible, and future people will care to resurrect those in there.

Even if a great current mind was preserved there, if people of the future are, say 2x brighter than us (not to mention having access to advanced AI) it would make little sense want to resurrect them for that alone. And as for having access to 20th-21st century info, with our trillions of bytes of video, images, texts and sound recorded every day, they'll likely want LESS, not more information about our times.

Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88

#187

Post by EdwardCoffin »

josteink wrote: post #184
EdwardCoffin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Danny Hillis: "The first time I met Marvin Minsky: I walked into his office, I was very intimidated. He was sitting there, he was throwing wadded up pieces of paper at a wastebasket across the room, and doing a terrible job of it. He's missing it, they're all falling short. So I watch this for a while. Then he looked up at me and said 'ah! I forgot! It's one half em gee squared!'" - From his talk On Game Software Dev…

Maybe I'm wrong, but that sounds like he was trying to get the formula for kinetic energy, which would be half em vee squared. Just to be clear: I'm not questioning the story, just the details in the recollection :)

I did wonder at the discrepancy at the time, so I re-listened to the audio several times carefully when I was writing the transcript above. To me, he is clearly saying gee rather than vee (could be an artifact of the recording though).

I'm sure Hillis knows more physics than I do (though I knew the equations of motion pretty well at one time), but he could easily have just mis-spoke. I didn't pursue this line of thought, but considered it might have been something to do with him deriving an expression for the vertical position in a gravitational field, perhaps in terms of horizontal motion or something.

Re: Marvin Minsky dies at 88

#188

Post by rpgmaker »

aomurphy wrote: post #79
rpgmaker wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Was it this one about Hofstader? http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-...

That seems to be the one thanks! I think that the article had some "code samples" and this one doesn't... but I may be confusing it with another article about quantum computing.
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