Marvin Minsky Quotes

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Marvin Minsky

Profession : Scientist

Birth : August 9, 1927

I heard that the same thing occurred in a scene in Alien, where the creature pops out of the chest of a crewman. The other actors didn't know what was to happen; the director wanted to get true surprise.

Marvin Minsky

By the way, it was his simulations that helped out in Jurassic Park - without them, there would have been only a few dinosaurs. Based on his techniques, Industrial Light and Magic could make whole herds of dinosaurs race across the screen.

Marvin Minsky

Around 1967 Dan Bobrow wrote a program to do algebra problems based on symbols rather than numbers.

Marvin Minsky

I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one's nature.

Marvin Minsky

I think every person either inherits or eventually makes up their own idea of what they are and who they are and what caused the world to be, and it seems to me that these stories of creation myth, adopted by different cultures - most of them are less insightful than the stories made up by individual poets and writers.

Marvin Minsky

The degree of intelligence that a man or a machine can show depends on many qualities of the ways that knowledge, goals, and problem-solving techniques are represented and put together, and not so much on the fine details.

Marvin Minsky

General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.

Marvin Minsky

Some people believe that you should die, and some people think dying is a nuisance. I'm one of the latter. So I think we should get rid of death.

Marvin Minsky

We all admire great accomplishments in the sciences, arts, and humanities - but we rarely acknowledge how much we achieve in the course of our everyday lives.

Marvin Minsky

It's degrading or insulting to say somebody is a good person or has a soul. Each person has built this incredibly complex structure, and if you attribute it to a magical pearl in the middle of an oyster that makes you good, that's trivializing a person and keeps you from thinking of what's really happening.

Marvin Minsky