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Description
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Personal Insights
Marvin Minsky has been so influential in so many fields that a brief summary cannot do him justice. He is one of the founders of artificial intelligence and robotics, and he has also made significant contributions in psychology and the theory of computing. He has received many awards and honors, including the A. M. Turing Award (1970), the Japan Prize (1990), the IJCAI Research Excellence Award (1991), and the Benjamin Franklin Medal (2001). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He served as president of AAAI from 1981 to 1982.
Our goal in this article is to provide readers with personal insights of Marvin from members of our AI community along with some brief discussion of his contributions.
Danny Hillis
When I first arrived as a freshman at MIT, I was determined to meet the legendary Marvin Minsky. I hung out around the AI lab hoping to run into him, but he never seemed to be around. Finally, I heard a rumor that he was down in the basement, working every night on some new kind of computer. I went down one evening to take a look, and sure enough, there he was, surrounded by red-lined diagrams, wire-wrap guns, half-finished computer boards, and a few very busy assistants. I was too shy to introduce myself, so I just stayed out of the way and watched for a while, quietly examining the circuit drawings that were strewn around the room.
When I noticed an error in one of the drawings I bravely went up to Marvin and pointed it out. "Well, fix it," he said. So, I looked around and found the right tools and rewired the emerging computer to fix the problem. Then Marvin asked me to fix something else, explaining to me how it was supposed to work. After a while, I guess he just assumed that I worked for him.
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So, that's how I started working for Marvin Minsky. Later, as I came to know Marvin as friend and mentor, I began to understand that this was a pretty normal interview process for him. Lots of people would hang around and say clever things, but he always paid attention to the ones who actually did something useful.
John McCarthy
Marvin came to Princeton as a graduate student in mathematics in 1950, a year after me. We quickly realized that we both were interested in artificial intelligence, as we later came to call it. Unlike me, I think Marvin already had some definite ideas about how to achieve (human-level) AI. These then resulted in his design for the SNARC neural net learner and later led to his 1954 Ph.D. thesis. I had had ideas different from his but didn't consider them good enough and didn't come to a definite approach (through logic) until 1957. Neither approach has yet reached human level--nor have any of the others.
Tom M. Mitchell
Marvin Minsky has had a significant impact on my own AI research over the years, despite the fact that we have had relatively few opportunities for face-to-face discussions. How can a person with whom I've had little personal contact have such a strong influence? It's easy--I have been inspired by Marvin's style of out-of-the-box thinking and by his vision and aspirations for the field of AI. His work with his students on machine learning, integrated robot/language/perception/planning systems, and frame representations has helped shape the field and no doubt my own thinking about it. But for me personally, Marvin's strongest influence has been serving as an existence proof that we mortals are capable of great ideas and great aspirations. He has strengthened my own courage to tackle problems that I might otherwise not and to avoid spending too much time on incremental extensions of well-worn ideas. Marvin is a creative genius, full of ideas and willing to pursue them to lengths that others might not.
I recall one episode, when I served with Marvin in the 1980s on... |
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