Marvin Minsky Quotes

A collection of quotes by Marvin Minsky.

Marvin Minsky (1927-2016) was an American cognitive scientist and computer science pioneer. He co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab in 1987 and made significant contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive science, and robotics. Minsky developed influential theories on human perception, intelligence, and the potential of machines to mimic human cognitive abilities. He was a key figure in the AI community and received numerous awards for his groundbreaking work. Sadly, Marvin Minsky passed away in January 2016, leaving behind a lasting legacy in the field of AI and computational thinking.

I think Lenat is headed in the right direction, but someone

I think Lenat is headed in the right direction, but someone needs to include a knowledge base about learning.

If you just have a single problem to solve, then fine, go ah

If you just have a single problem to solve, then fine, go ahead and use a neural network. But if you want to do science and understand how to choose architectures, or how to go to a new problem, you have to understand what different architectures can and cannot do.

There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI for

There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.

Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For

Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!

When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he genera

When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.

We wanted to solve robot problems and needed some vision, ac

We wanted to solve robot problems and needed some vision, action, reasoning, planning, and so forth. We even used some structural learning, such as was being explored by Patrick Winston.

Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, wherea

Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke's is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.