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Marvin Lee Minsky (born August 9 , 1927 ), sometimes affectionately known as "Old Man Minsky", is an American Cognitive Scientist in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), co-founder of MIT 's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and Philosophy . BIOGRAPHY Marvin Minsky was born in New York City , where he attended The Fieldston School and Bronx High School Of Science . He later attended Phillips Academy , in Andover, Massachusetts . He served in the US Navy in 1944-45. He holds a BA in Mathematics from Harvard (1950) and a PhD in the same field from Princeton (1954). He has been on the MIT faculty since 1958. He is currently Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science , at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been awarded many honors. He won the Turing Award in 1969, the Japan Prize in 1990, the IJCAI Award For Research Excellence in 1991, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2001. Minsky's Patent s include the first head-mounted graphical display (1963) as well as the confocal scanning microscope (a predecessor to today's widely used Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope ) and, jointly with Seymour Papert , the first Logo "turtle". Minsky also built, in 1951 , the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, SNARC . {Link without Title} : I did patent my 1956 confocal microscope, but the patent expired before anyone built a second one. We did not bother to patent the display or the turtle, assuming that they were perfectly obvious. Looks like 'obviousity' is no longer relevant to patenting. -- Marvin Minsky He wrote the book '' Perceptron s'' (with Seymour A. Papert), which became the foundational work in the analysis of Artificial Neural Network s. Its criticism of unrigorous research in the field has been claimed as being responsible for the virtual disappearance of artificial neural networks from academic research in the 1970s. {Link without Title} : So it was claimed--but actually our mathematical analysis was to show why bigger perceptrons didn't get better at solving hard problems. And contrary to a popular rumor, almost all our theorems still apply to multilayer Minsky was an adviser on the movie and is referred to in the movie and book, :"Probably no one would ever know this; it did not matter. In the 1980s, Minsky and Good had shown how neural networks could be generated automatically—self replicated—in accordance with any arbitrary learning program. Artificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to the development of a human brain. In any given case, the precise details would never be known, and even if they were, they would be millions of times too complex for human understanding." Minsky was almost killed due to an accident on the set. Minsky was also responsible for suggesting the underlying plot of Jurassic Park to Michael Crichton during a walk on the beach in Malibu . At that point in the meanderings which led to the classic novel and film, the dinosaurs were conceived as Automata . Crichton later drew on his biomedical training to conceive the dinosaurs as arising through cloning. {Link without Title} : It wasn't about automata. My idea was that even if the DNA in the fossils was gone, it might have affected the positions of the atoms that replaced it. The result would be very noisy, but a dinosaur might have had a trillion cells, so if we had the locations of all the atoms in the fossil, we might be able to reconstruct the DNA by statistical analysis. Unlikely though, and Crichton got the better idea about insects in amber. I'm sure it was in Malibu indeed, because Farrah Fawcett came running by while we were talking. -- Marvin Minsky In the early 1970s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Minsky and Seymour Papert started developing what came to be called The Society Of Mind theory. The theory attempts to explain how what we call intelligence could be a product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. Minsky says that the biggest source of ideas about the theory came from his work in trying to create a machine that uses a robotic arm, a video camera, and a computer to build with children's blocks. In 1986 Minsky published a comprehensive book on the theory which, unlike most of his previously published work, was written for a general audience. Minsky is an actor in an artificial intelligence Koan (attributed to his student, Danny Hillis ) from the Jargon File : :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. :"So that the room will be empty." :At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
AFFILIATIONS Marvin Minsky is affiliated with the following organizations:
TRIVIA Minsky is a childhood friend of the Yale University critic Harold Bloom , who has referred to him as "the sinister Marvin Minsky." SELECTED WORKS
REFERENCES # http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/ SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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