Marvin Minsky Quotes

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Marvin Minsky

Profession : Scientist

Birth : August 9, 1927

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.

Marvin Minsky

With the appearance of communications networks and interconnected computers, we got the world wide web, and it changed the lives of most people, I think.

Marvin Minsky

I started working at a point in history when digital computers were becoming mature, and before that, there were no such machines.

Marvin Minsky

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.

Marvin Minsky

I believed in realism, as summarized by John McCarthy's comment to the effect that if we worked really hard, we'd have an intelligent system in from four to four hundred years.

Marvin Minsky

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!

Marvin Minsky

There are three basic approaches to AI: Case-based, rule-based, and connectionist reasoning.

Marvin Minsky

I suspect that pleasure is mainly used to turn off parts of the brain so you can keep fresh the memories of things you're trying to learn. It protects the short-term memory buffers. That's one theory of pleasure.

Marvin Minsky

In general we are least aware of what our minds do best.

Marvin Minsky

We humans are not the end of evolution, so if we can make a machine that's as smart as a person, we can probably also make one that's much smarter. There's no point in making just another person. You want to make one that can do things we can't.

Marvin Minsky

Sometimes a problem will seem completely insurmountable. Then someone comes up with a simple new idea, or just a rearrangement of old ideas, that completely eliminates it.

Marvin Minsky

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.

Marvin Minsky

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.

Marvin Minsky

This is a tricky domain because, unlike simple arithmetic, to solve a calculus problem - and in particular to perform integration - you have to be smart about which integration technique should be used: integration by partial fractions, integration by parts, and so on.

Marvin Minsky

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.

Marvin Minsky

The basic idea in case-based, or CBR, is that the program has stored problems and solutions. Then, when a new problem comes up, the program tries to find a similar problem in its database by finding analogous aspects between the problems.

Marvin Minsky

Stanley Kubrick knew we had good graphics around MIT and came to my lab to find out how to do it. We had some really good stuff. I was very impressed with Kubrick; he knew all the graphics work I had ever heard of, and probably more.

Marvin Minsky

Once when I was standing at the base, they started rotating the set and a big, heavy wrench fell down from the 12 o'clock position of the set, and got buried in the ground a few feet from me. I could have been killed!

Marvin Minsky

No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; but most of the time, we aren't either.

Marvin Minsky

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

Marvin Minsky