13 ms·

Marvin Minsky dies at 88

1259 points by joelg 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
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mindcrime 11y ago
Oh man... This is really sad news. I mean, don't get me wrong, ANY death is sad news, especially for that person's friends and family. But while I never knew Marvin Minsky personally, I've felt his influence on my life for a long time. AI has always been one of my favorite subjects, and he's one of the forefathers of AI research and his presence looms large in the life of anyone connected to the field. So this feels like losing an old friend. Not to mention that he was a brilliant mind, and his loss is a loss for humanity at large. Anyway, RIP Mr. Minsky.
Tossrock 11y ago
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. RIP.
- bijection 11y ago
  From the jargon file [1] [1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html#id3141241 http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html#id3141241
  - tarr11 11y ago
    Found this original version copied from this story (original source is a dead link) [1] "So Sussman began working on a program. Not long after, this odd-looking bald guy came over. Sussman figured the guy was going to boot him out, but instead the man sat down, asking, “Hey, what are you doing?” Sussman talked over his program with the man, Marvin Minsky. At one point in the discussion, Sussman told Minsky that he was using a certain randomizing technique in his program because he didn’t want the machine to have any preconceived notions. Minsky said, “Well, it has them, it’s just that you don’t know what they are.” It was the most profound thing Gerry Sussman had ever heard. And Minsky continued, telling him that the world is built a certain way, and the most important thing we can do with the world is avoid randomness, and figure out ways by which things can be planned. Wisdom like this has its effect on seventeen-year-old freshmen, and from then on Sussman was hooked.]" [1] http://spetharrific.tumblr.com/post/26600309788/sussman-attains-enlightenment http://spetharrific.tumblr.com/post/26600309788/sussman-atta...
    - dandrews 11y ago
      That sounds like the version told in Levy's Hackers. Maybe someone in HN-land can verify that; I can't find my copy.
      - tashi 11y ago
        Verified. Chapter 6, page 117 in my paperback edition.
      - dTal 11y ago
        Someone posted this elsewhere in the thread: https://web.archive.org/web/20120717041345/http://sch57.msk.ru/~khim/hackers/part1/chapter6.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120717041345/http://sch57.msk....
    - dTal 11y ago
      I had no idea that koan was a (mostly) true story. Thanks a lot for posting.
      - kkylin 11y ago
        Yes, I had once asked GJS about that exactly that story, and he confirmed it (though maybe not the exact words).
- EdwardCoffin 11y ago
  Danny Hillis: "The first time I met Marvin Minsky: I walked into his office, I was very intimidated. He was sitting there, he was throwing wadded up pieces of paper at a wastebasket across the room, and doing a terrible job of it. He's missing it, they're all falling short. So I watch this for a while. Then he looked up at me and said 'ah! I forgot! It's one half em gee squared!'" - From his talk On Game Software Development, in 2001 I think (from Technetcast.com)
  - josteink 11y ago
    Maybe I'm wrong, but that sounds like he was trying to get the formula for kinetic energy, which would be half em vee squared. Just to be clear: I'm not questioning the story, just the details in the recollection :)
    - EdwardCoffin 11y ago
      I did wonder at the discrepancy at the time, so I re-listened to the audio several times carefully when I was writing the transcript above. To me, he is clearly saying gee rather than vee (could be an artifact of the recording though). I'm sure Hillis knows more physics than I do (though I knew the equations of motion pretty well at one time), but he could easily have just mis-spoke. I didn't pursue this line of thought, but considered it might have been something to do with him deriving an expression for the vertical position in a gravitational field, perhaps in terms of horizontal motion or something.
- evanb 11y ago
  Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children. --Marvin Minsky http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/sciam.inherit.html http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/sciam.inherit.html
- gohrt 11y ago
  It is now several decades later. Do TensorFlow/CNN builders use random initial configurations, or custom designed stuctures?
  - argonaut 11y ago
    Usually random drawn from a certain distribution (ex: Gaussian with std. deviation 0.001, or a std. deviation dependent on the number of input/output units (Xavier initialization)). For some tasks, you may wish to initialize using a network that was already trained on a different dataset, if you have reason to believe the new training task is similar to the previous task.
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - Houshalter 11y ago
    NN weights need to start random because otherwise two weights with exactly the same value can get "stuck" and be unable to differentiate. Backpropagation relies on starting random patterns that kind of match so that it can fine tune them. But the weights are often initialized to be really close to zero.
    - brianpgordon 11y ago
      Given the era though, Sussman may have actually been working with a neural net that's not the typical hidden-layer variety. "Randomly wired" could be a statement about the topography of the network, not about the weights.
      - argonaut 11y ago
        There is no evidence he was actually working with a neural net. https://web.archive.org/web/20120717041345/http://sch57.msk.ru/~khim/hackers/part1/chapter6.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120717041345/http://sch57.msk....
        11y ago
- georgespencer 11y ago
  I always loved this TED talk of his https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYsTv-ap3XQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYsTv-ap3XQ
  - peter303 11y ago
    This is not the Prof Minsky I remember from 1970s where I was a MIT student. His mind was laser sharp then and could drill into the core of any problem.
    - copperx 11y ago
      It doesn't look to me like he's unfocused or forgetful on the video. What are you referring to exactly?
- jes5199 11y ago
  Amazingly, according to this 1981 interview in the New Yorker, Minsky's first neural net was itself randomly wired! http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/12/14/a-i http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/12/14/a-i "Because of the random wiring, it had a sort of fail-safe characteristic. If one of the neurons wasn’t working, it wouldn’t make much of a difference—and, with nearly three hundred tubes and the thousands of connections we had soldered, there would usually be something wrong somewhere. In those days, even a radio set with twenty tubes tended to fail a lot. I don’t think we ever debugged our machine completely, but that didn’t matter. By having this crazy random design, it was almost sure to work, no matter how you built it."
- areyousure 11y ago
  Honest question: What does this koan mean? Specifically, what is closing one's eyes analogous to in the neural network? What is the recommended alternative action?
  - Scarblac 11y ago
    Somewhere else is the thread is a closer rendition of how the actual exchange went. Using that, I finally understand the koan: Closing his eyes did not make the room empty. It made him not know which things were where. Randomizing the neural network did not remove all the preconceptions from the network. It made him not know what the network's preconceptions were.
deleted 11y ago
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daughart 11y ago
Besides his contributions to computer science, his invention of the confocal microscope profoundly affected biology research and is still in wide use.
- memming 11y ago
  Wow, I didn't know that he invented confocal!
julianpye 11y ago
Isaac Asimov: "The only people I ever met whose intellects surpassed my own were Carl Sagan and Marvin Minsky."
- baddox 11y ago
  That's high praise, although I guess he never met von Neumann.
- azinman2 11y ago
  Pretty egotistical to frame it that way of Asimov.
  - paloaltokid 11y ago
    You are not Isaac Asimov. Therefore you cannot know his mind. So maybe he wasn't boasting at all.
    - azinman2 11y ago
      If that's true, then he needs to work on his language because it's easily interpreted that way. Either that or the GP needs to expand the quote.
    - HQWT93xCRh 11y ago
      Isaac Asimov wasn't any of the people he wasn't talking about either, so maybe he should've kept it shut about their minds, too. But that wouldn't make good banter.
  - JshWright 11y ago
    Have you read much of what Asimov wrote about himself?
  - SwellJoe 11y ago
    There are a bunch of adjectives I would use to describe Asimov, and egotistical is so far down the list I'd get bored listing them before I got to it. It seems likely to be a realistic and honest self-assessment, on the basis of the breadth, depth, and foresight, of Asimov's written work. If you're Usain Bolt, is it egotistical to say, "I'm probably the fastest runner in the world?" Why is intellect so much different? Sure, there's no precise measure of intelligence...but, someone with great intellectual achievement gets to, at the very least, lay claim to great intellect. It would be easily dismissed if said by someone much less accomplished. In this case, I just take it as a frank statement of belief. Regardless, I think it's safe to say Minsky was a great intellect, of a caliber not often seen.
hydandata 11y ago
What a sad day, he was truly one of the great minds of the twentieth century. Inspiration to generations. P.S. Web of Stories has an extensive, autobiography style interview with Marvin Minsky [1]. [1] http://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/1 http://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/1
saosebastiao 11y ago
RIP. I will always hold him as an inspiration. Of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neats_vs._scruffies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neats_vs._scruffies I find it interesting because Minsky did a lot of the foundational work in Neural Network research yet he philosophically identified as the opposite on the Neat/Scruffy spectrum of most NN researchers today. Much like Bayes, I think there is some immense wisdom from his research that will not even be acknowledged as wisdom for decades.
- qmalzp 11y ago
  I reckon Scruffy is good for inventing a new field, Neat is good for pushing it to the limit.
- proc0 11y ago
  I think that's interesting as well. I would have guessed he was a Neat from his talks and his admiration of AGI because it implies he agrees there will have to be a succinct theory of general intelligence/consciousness.
  - saosebastiao 11y ago
    I would probably guess that he believed in an eventual theory of general intelligence/consciousness, but probably not that it will be easy/succinct/simple. For example, Neural Networks have made extreme breakthroughs in sensory perception and classification, partly through modeling how humans perceive and classify. But do those theories extend over to other areas of intelligence like Planning? Creative capabilities? Emotion? Empathy? Especially if we know that there are other players (such as hormones, genetics, epigenetics, culture, etc.) beyond Neurons in those areas? The fact of the matter is that there are countless factors in how intelligence develops, let alone influence the development of all of the auxiliary functions for intelligence (such as memory, reflexes, sensory, etc.). EDIT: You can get a little intro to his thoughts on the matter starting about 27:16 in this video [1] (linked at the time marker). If you watch for about 10 minutes, he demonstrates some of the difficulties of using single abstractions for something as complex as human intelligence. [1] https://youtu.be/-pb3z2w9gDg?t=1636 https://youtu.be/-pb3z2w9gDg?t=1636
ffk 11y ago
Admin, can we get a black bar for this? Marvin Minsky is widely referred to as the "Founding Father of AI."
- Eliezer 11y ago
  I can't imagine who deserves a black bar if Minsky doesn't, unless a grey bar would be more appropriate (Minsky was signed up for cryonics with Alcor, so he's not dead dead.)
  - rbanffy 11y ago
    When he's uploaded, who owns the copyright of this mind? Should it be considered a derivative work from his education?
    - Eliezer 11y ago
      Uh, Minsky does?
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - rbanffy 11y ago
        This debate will be an interesting one. I imagine life insurance companies demanding their money back if the once deceased person is alive again. Also, how would inheritance work if heirs can spawn multiple instances of themselves that may not act as a single collective (and inheriting copyright may fit here). It'll be fun.
  - reality_hacker 11y ago
    > I can't imagine who deserves a black bar if Minsky doesn't Have you chance to elaborate why this guy deserved this? Did he build first neural network, lisp machine, ALICE chatbot, break image net. I always considered him as some kind of celebrity from science, while other guys, which names nobody remembers, actually pushed AI movement by doing real things, while working on Google Brain, Watson, cyc, trying to catch spam, terrorists and fraudsters.
ggreer 11y ago
Interesting fact: Minsky is an Alcor member[1], so he's probably being cryopreserved right now. Though if he died from a cerebral hemorrhage, I'm not sure how well they'll be able to preserve his brain. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcor_Life_Extension_Foundation#Membership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcor_Life_Extension_Foundatio...
- reasonattlm 11y ago
  One can hope that they'll make the attempt regardless. Alcor's position is to carry out their directive from a member regardless of third party opinions on viability where they can, as having the reputation for doing this minimizes the very real problem of interference from family members (for reasons economic, religious, etc). Also it is very hard to say at the time (as time is critical) how much damage is done via fatal brain injury of this nature, and of course at this point next to impossible to say what that will do the the odds and difficulty of future restoration. Brain injury kept Roy Walford from being cryopreserved, though there it was clearly an extension of his own thoughts on the matter: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=24045 http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=24045 I see that as a terrible shame; it is guessing in advance as to the limits of what can be restored.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    Agreed. Not trying guarantees failure; trying leaves some possibility of success.
    - Outdoorsman 11y ago
      Agreed...given the resources and money there's nothing wrong with hedging your bets...
- samstave 11y ago
  Ironic that he died from cerebral hemorrhage! EDIT: I find it ironic - as he was my first exposure to the science of mind and thought etc... I find it ironic that his own death was due to a failure of the brain/mind in some way given how much he has contributed to the idea of thought and mind in his career.
jonbaer 11y ago
"You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way." ... RIP ... The Society of Mind one of the best books.
- mjklin 11y ago
  After reading that book my imagination came up with a cartoon I doodled in my notebook. It was someone speaking at Minsky's funeral and saying "I know he thought my mind was just a bunch of simple machines like Builder, but he was still a pretty good guy." Not that I knew anything about him... it was just an impression.
- physicsyogi 11y ago
  I remember reading The Society of Mind in high school and being amazed by the ideas after reading his novel The Turing Option. I haven't thought about either in years. Looking back, maybe it's no surprise that I work in machine learning now.
rootbear 11y ago
Minsky used to give talks at the annual Boskone Science Fiction Convention. I heard several and enjoyed them greatly, he was an entertaining speaker.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  He also spoke at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston in 1989. The only time I got to see him speak in person.
jordhy 11y ago
This is sad beyond words. He was an admirable genius and a very candid person. May he rest in peace.
_pius 11y ago
We just lost a giant. Hard to imagine someone more black bar worthy for Hacker News, hope we have one up soon.
- krapp 11y ago
  I hope not. The black bar has become a meaningless exercise in political posturing. Edit: allow me to clarify - just having to choose whether or not someone is "black bar worthy" is distasteful. Ian Murdock didn't get a black bar that I can recall, and I don't remember seeing one since then, even though other people relevant to the community have died. Are we to expect someone to change the color of the bar every time a death in the tech community occurs, and how to we judge relevance in that regard? No, it's an arbitrary gesture that doesn't really honor anything or anyone. It just gives people something to argue about. Why did someone get a black bar and someone else didn't? Why was this person deserving of it, and not that person? It's best to just remove it altogether.
  - euske 11y ago
    Just want to speak up and say that your comment is actually very sensible, and it's terrifying to see it's downvoted.
  - tlrobinson 11y ago
    Out of curiosity, does anyone have a list of people who HN has enabled the black bar for?
    - tlrobinson 11y ago
      I went ahead and compiled a list of "black bar" memorials from what I could remember and a little bit of searching. (It's probably not comprehensive, but it's clearly composed of computing luminaries and members of the YC community) Dan Haubert (1984 - 2009) Robert Morris (1932 - 2011) John McCarthy (1927 - 2011) Dennis Ritchie (1941 - 2011) Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011) Doug Engelbart (1925 - 2013) Aaron Swartz (1986 - 2013) Gene Amdahl (1922 - 2015) Marvin Minsky (1927 - 2016)
  - 11y ago
Eliezer 11y ago
I had the chance to walk with Marvin Minsky down a hallway once, and I asked him what he thought of Bayesian reasoning. He said that it seemed to him like it was still part of a general trend away from tackling the central problem in AI. I said I didn't think so, but he seemed tired so I didn't try to go into detail. There's an urban legend that I once got into a fistfight with Marvin Minsky, which does about as well as anything to illustrate the crazy, crazy things that people have been known to believe about me. We have temporarily misplaced a great mind. See you later, Professor Minsky.
- rpgmaker 11y ago
  I keep thinking about an article I read a couple of years ago about the two schools of thought in AI: the now popular Conventional AI and (I believe) Computational AI. The article was mainly about the lead proponent of computational AI and how, after he helped give birth to the AI field, he was in effect being ostracised because he didn't think conventional AI should be considered "intelligence" as we generally think of it. I'm paraphrasing of course but I'm wondering if Marvin Minsky was the subject of that article? It has been nagging me for a couple of months now and I just don't remember where did I read it or the name of the subject.
  - nickbauman 11y ago
    What you're asking makes me think of Dijkstra's quote "the question whether machines can think as relevant as the question whether submarines can swim."
  - aomurphy 11y ago
    Was it this one about Hofstader? http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-...
    - rpgmaker 11y ago
      That seems to be the one thanks! I think that the article had some "code samples" and this one doesn't... but I may be confusing it with another article about quantum computing.
chriskanan 11y ago
I think Minsky was the last living giant of AI that attended the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, which many cite as being the beginning of NLP, computer vision, machine learning, etc. Sad news...
- finin 11y ago
  Trenchard More of Dartmouth was also a participant and is, as far as I know, still alive
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  More than an attendee, he was one of the proposers. The proposal: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmou...
pyrrhotech 11y ago
Very sad and surreal, I happened to just be reading his Wikipedia page yesterday. I hope the cause of death does not prevent his cryopreservation. Say what you will about cryonics, but it definitely gives you a better chance of living again than internment or cremation. I hope the world will see his genius again.
ryanmarsh 11y ago
Favorite paper of his: Why Programming is a Good Medium for Expressing Poorly Understood and Sloppily-Formulated Ideas http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Why%20programming%20is--.html http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Why%20programming%20...
jonbarker 11y ago
Glad I was able to get to meet Marvin back in 2014. On cognitive neuroscience he was pessimistic, he likened it to telling a chemist to try and discern what a computer was doing by looking at the machine without the monitor. Really enjoyed that analogy.
ehudla 11y ago
One of my earliest exposures to CS was his Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines. "Communication with Alien Intelligence" is another favorite of mine. The idea of enumerating all possible Turing Machines and looking for ones that do something meaningful is brilliant.
- Igglyboo 11y ago
  Is the set of all turing machines finite?
  - govg 11y ago
    No, but they can be put in a 1-1 mapping with the integers, making them countably infinite.
  - qu4z-2 11y ago
    No, but it only needs to be countable, by my understanding.
- gshubert17 11y ago
  It is too bad that his book Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines is out of print.
  - mindcrime 11y ago
    Very true, but FWIW, it's not too hard to find a copy, whether it's a used dead-tree copy (18 or more available on Amazon.com right now), or a bootleg PDF. The PDF version is on the popular e-book sharing sites.
- igravious 11y ago
  My father had a book by Minsky which I swiped from his bookshelf and read cover to cover. I can't for the life of me remember the title but looking over his bibliography I think it was this one. This book, if indeed it was this one, had a big impact on my younger self, though I'm ashamed of two things now: 1) I can't remember exactly what it was about it that affected me so, and 2) I don't know where the book is! I do remember the chapters about McCulloch-Pitts artificial neurons and Turing machines and the halting problem. I'd dearly love to find a copy of that book to see if my older self recognises what my younger self saw in it.
vonnik 11y ago
Some great sentences from 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. In general we are least aware of what our minds do best.
endlessvoid94 11y ago
Can we get a black bar for this one?
morenoh149 11y ago
thankfully MIT open courseware recorded one of his classes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pb3z2w9gDg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pb3z2w9gDg the society of mind class 6.868
dmschulman 11y ago
Minsky helped design one of the coolest musical gadgets I've ever come across, the Triadex Muse. Being a sort of self-generative music box, Minsky imagined a future where families would gather around such musical machines instead of turning to boring old television for their entertainment and relaxation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triadex_Muse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triadex_Muse
dang 11y ago
Here's a nice tribute by Philip Greenspun: http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2016/01/25/marvin-minsky-1927-2016-the-death-of-a-skeptic/ http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2016/01/25/marvin-minsky-1927..., via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10971472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10971472.
DonHopkins 11y ago
He was truly a brilliant and humble man, who wrote so much influential and interesting stuff! Here's one of my favorite papers by Marvin Minsky: Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious Marvin Minsky, MIT Abstract: Freud's theory of jokes explains how they overcome the mental "censors" that make it hard for us to think "forbidden" thoughts. But his theory did not work so well for humorous nonsense as for other comical subjects. In this essay I argue that the different forms of humor can be seen as much more similar, once we recognize the importance of knowledge about knowledge and, particularly, aspects of thinking concerned with recognizing and suppressing bugs -- ineffective or destructive thought processes. When seen in this light, much humor that at first seems pointless, or mysterious, becomes more understandable. http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt
DonHopkins 11y ago
Here's a video image from the POV of a robotic Dakin Bear of Marvin Minsky's son, Henry Minsky, who had a look of trepidation at the idea of sacrificing his Dakin Bear to one of his dad's robotics experiments. http://imgur.com/gcFVzpk http://imgur.com/gcFVzpk
idotob 11y ago
May he rest in perfect peace http://www.idotob.com http://www.idotob.com
proc0 11y ago
So sad. I wanted him to survive until a true AI breakthrough happens, which seems so close (granted for many decades now, but that's why).
- luckydude 11y ago
  If you look at what the cars are doing, I'm not an AI guy, but that deep learning that the cars are doing seems like something he might like. In my book that neural network stuff is AI.
  - wittedhaddock 11y ago
    Machine learning is not Artificial Intelligence. Machine Learning is applied science. Artificial Intelligence is science.
gonzo 11y ago
I met Minsky once in February 1987, at a rally in Las Vegas to protest the Nevada Test Site.. A lot of famous people (Carl Sagan, Barbara Boxer, Tom Downey, Ramsey Clark, Martin Sheen, Kris Kristofferson) were there, but I'd gone to meet Minsky. I had taken along a (quite early) copy of the GNU Emacs manual. The FSF was selling them, but I'd put this one together myself. Running TeX on the texinfo source, converting the output for the Imagen printer, and then taking it to Kinko's to be spiral bound, including my imitation of the yellow cover that the FSF version had. I asked Minsky for his autograph. He looked at what I presented, understood what it was, an autographed inside the front cover, "Marvin Minsky, friend of Stallman". In April of 2011 in an airport in Honolulu, I presented that same manual for an autograph to Richard Stallman. He looked my manual over for a long time. IIRC, it documents Emacs version 16 or 17. Then he signed it, below Minsky's autograph, "Richard M. Stallman - Friend of Minsky" RIP, Marvin.
- pavs 11y ago
  Amazing. If possible, can you please share a picture of the autographs?
  - joe563323 11y ago
    Yes. Please please please do share the picture of autographs.
- ubersol1 11y ago
  Interesting. But I wonder, was it a coincidence that you had the manual with you in Honolulu ? Or do you take the manual with you everywhere you go ? :)
  - gonzo 11y ago
    I'd actually paid to fly Stallman to Honolulu to attend pfosscon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-lP8lPYPDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-lP8lPYPDU While he was in Hawaii, I also paid to fly him to the "Big Island" (Hawaii) to speak with people (mostly astronomers and their children, though some people drove up from Hilo.) https://blogs.oracle.com/barton808/entry/my_travels_in_hawaii_with https://blogs.oracle.com/barton808/entry/my_travels_in_hawai... Since I was paying for his ticket, I knew he would be at the airport. I lived in Hawaii at the time. Back in Las Vegas (where I lived at the time), the book, and emacs, were new to me. I took it to read then.
reviseddamage 11y ago
I'm trying to figure out who will play him in the Hollywood movie about him.
christianbryant 11y ago
K-Lines (Knowledge-lines). I still meditate on this idea, and Minsky's paper "K-lines: A Theory of Memory". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-line_(artificial_intelligence) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-line_(artificial_intelligenc...
eruditely 11y ago
> Underlying our approach to this subject is our conviction that "computer science" is not a science and that its significance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects. Mathematics provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of "what is." Computation provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of "how to." http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Why%20programming%20is--.html http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Why%20programming%20... https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/front/node3.html https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/front/node3.html From SICP preface, which is the quote that actually matters, this is inspired by Minsky's quote. I hate that the quote that went public were all the other less inspired quotes from SICP.
d0mdo0ss 11y ago
One amazon review for The Society of Mind says "The book has nothing to do with artificial intelligence. It has everything to do with speculation. And since no one has builty the society of mind from this blueprint in over 15 years, what does that tell us about the usefulness of the idea??" A"Marvin Minsky" replied: "It tells us that most AI researchers are still looking for oversimplistic solutions to problems. This reviewer does not understand that new ideas often take 2 decades to spread, because most practitioners in most fields don't oftenmake changes in their careers. The ideas in my 1961 "Steps toward Artificial Intelligence" became general practice aroun 1980, and those in "The Society of Mind," are only now (2007) becoming widely adopted."
- myztic 11y ago
  He also wrote a few product reviews http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A3145L3LF7U7F5/ref=cm_cr_pr_pdp?ie=UTF8 http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A3145L3LF7U7F5/ref=cm_c... ;)
mckoss 11y ago
As a grad student, I remember shooting the bull with Minsky and Hillis (1983). The CIA had offices across the hall and we were discussing how we might grab one of their bags of shredded documents and use a computer to piece together all the fragments by hashing the pattern of edge fragments on each piece.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  Which later became a real-life DARPA Challenge (solved). http://archive.darpa.mil/shredderchallenge/ http://archive.darpa.mil/shredderchallenge/ And, come to think of it, a variation was in the novel Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge.
  - zimpenfish 11y ago
    There's an excellent chapter about it in http://www.glassner.com/portfolio/morphs-mallards-and-montages/ http://www.glassner.com/portfolio/morphs-mallards-and-montag...
anateus 11y ago
I got to spend some time talking with him once when we were both visiting the offices of OLPC in Cambridge, more or less across the street from MIT's building 32 where CSAIL is located. I told him a little about what I was working on (learning agents attached to dialogue systems) and he had some insights. I ran out to the coop to buy another copy of The Society of Mind and he signed it. We also talked a little bit about some of the ideas in his The Emotion Machine, which I hadn't read at that point. On top of his work, Minsky taught me that you should meet your idols. If they're worth it you walk away enriched and invigorated.
tuananh 11y ago
@seldo (CTO of npmjs) > True story: in my final essay of my AI module at uni, I disagreed with everything Minsky believed, so my professor, a fan, flunked me.
maze-le 11y ago
When I first came into contact with AI at the University, I really enjoyed reading his Essays. As A Undergraduate I wasn't really ready to read his papers, but publications like "Why People Think Computers Can't" and "Matter, Mind and Models" (wich where recommendations of my prof.) really got me interested in this field. Rest in peace, Mr. Minsky.
iMark 11y ago
He had a wonderful way of expressing ideas. This always resonated with me: "Minds are what brains do"
poseid 11y ago
RIP Marvin Minsky http://thinkingonthinking.com/marvin-minsky-passed-away/ http://thinkingonthinking.com/marvin-minsky-passed-away/
heyrhett 11y ago
While I was a student at MIT, I heard a rumor that Prof. Minsky in the 1960's thought computer vision was such an easy problem that he assigned it to a first year undergrad. I asked him if it was true, and he said that it wasn't true that he thought the problem was easy, but it is true that he had a first year undergrad student that he decided to put in charge of his grad students working on the problem. The first year student was Gerald Sussman.
EGreg 11y ago
Reading the comments here, I would have loved to meet the guy. I'm in my 30s and I've met and spoken to precious few of "the greats" of our generation. I feel like there are two phenomena going on: 1) We don't always know who is one of "the greats" of today's generation, until much later. 2) Today, content generation is so democratized (eg wikipedia, soundcloud) that there are less individual superstars like Pushkin, etc. 3) Even intellectuals who were once highly regarded would today have tons of comments on their blog nitpicking and debating every detail of what they said, with many of the comments being low quality. See eg Sam Harris vs Noam Chomsky debates. It seems like a world in which it's harder to be great like Alan Turing or Claude Shannon or Richard Feynman or Marvin Minsky. At the same time, maybe there are more great people than ever, and we just don't always know who they are until much later.
mhalle 11y ago
Danny Hillis introduced Marvin at the MIT Media Lab's 30th anniversary in October 2015, where they both participated in a remarkable panel discussion. Though not as strong and fast-talking as he once was, Marvin's humor and wisdom shine through. Here's a link to the video: http://www.media.mit.edu/video/view/ml30-2015-10-30-01 http://www.media.mit.edu/video/view/ml30-2015-10-30-01 Danny begins his introduction at about 41:29.
fuck_dang 11y ago
God, when I log on to HN in the morning and see that damned black bar I know it's going to hurt. But Marvin Minsky? My Tuesday wasn't ready for this. He has had such an impact on the field of AI, and even on the social dialogues about it. Not everybody thinks that robots are going to go Skynet on us, and a lot of us that realize that were informed by his work. Whether directly or indirectly, so much of his work has become common knowledge amongst AI enthusiasts and scientists. I'd be wasting my breath to say that he'll be missed, of course. I wish I could have met him.
elfyhat 11y ago
"If you like somebody's work just go and see them. However, don't ask for their autograph. A lot of people came and asked me for my autograph and it's creepy." -- Marvin Minsky (https://youtu.be/qJZ_1a-t_sA?t=1543 https://youtu.be/qJZ_1a-t_sA?t=1543)
wittedhaddock 11y ago
I audited a class on policy at the Harvard Kennedy School in October of 2015, and instead of going to class one day, we listened to a speaker (Jaron Lanier). After the talk, I stuck around in the front row and eavesdropped on people asking him questions. Eventually, one person came up to his side and asked "are you going to Marvin's house tonight?" I thought this person may have been talking about Minsky! So after Jaron responded with a "maybe" I approached this man and asked him if he was. And he did mean Minsky!! This man and I started talking about intelligence, ML vs. symbolic, and more... he truly knew many intricacies of AI! Eventually, for some amazing reason, out of nowhere he asked me if I wanted to come to Marvin's house that evening! Of course I said yes! At the time, the only paper I had on me was ironically Patrick Winston's thesis printed out in my backpack, so this man wrote the name "Henry Lieberman" (a colleague of Minsky's) on the cover and gave me Minsky's address! I went to Marvin's house that evening, and it was simply wonderful! We talked about SoM, and I was included in these discussions and was treated like a colleague. Marvin answered all my initial questions, but only created more within me! He engaged me! I really felt included. It was one of luckiest days in my life. I'm sharing because I'm reading other stories about people's encounters with Marvin, and while I was reading them I didn't feel as sad. Perhaps mine might do the same for someone somewhere.
xxcode 11y ago
I would go to Marvin's lectures - they were in the evening, like 7PM or so. This was early 2000's, and I was a grad student at MIT. I went to Patrick Winston, and asked him if it was worth going to Marvin's lectures given that I keep falling asleep. He said - of course, we all know you are overworked, but marvin may say something that will change your life.
richardboegli 11y ago
I recall reading a book by Rodney Brooks where IIRC he recounts his time in the MIT AI lab and how Marvin Minsky prose him certain problems to solve. I think this was in reference to a robot turtle or something to that affect.
bl4ckdu5t 11y ago
RIP Marvin. We're glad you've introduced what has become a great topic of interest to us today. AI just started getting even more interesting than ever since late last year and at least he lived to see that what he had started is what's gradually building the future we hope for

1259 points by joelg 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Oh man... This is really sad news. I mean, don't get me wrong, ANY death is sad news, especially for that person's friends and family. But while I never knew Marvin Minsky personally, I've felt his influence on my life for a long time. AI has always been one of my favorite subjects, and he's one of the forefathers of AI research and his presence looms large in the life of anyone connected to the field. So this feels like losing an old friend. Not to mention that he was a brilliant mind, and his loss is a loss for humanity at large. Anyway, RIP Mr. Minsky.

Tossrock 11y ago

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. RIP.

bijection 11y ago
From the jargon file [1] [1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html#id3141241 http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html#id3141241
- tarr11 11y ago
  Found this original version copied from this story (original source is a dead link) [1] "So Sussman began working on a program. Not long after, this odd-looking bald guy came over. Sussman figured the guy was going to boot him out, but instead the man sat down, asking, “Hey, what are you doing?” Sussman talked over his program with the man, Marvin Minsky. At one point in the discussion, Sussman told Minsky that he was using a certain randomizing technique in his program because he didn’t want the machine to have any preconceived notions. Minsky said, “Well, it has them, it’s just that you don’t know what they are.” It was the most profound thing Gerry Sussman had ever heard. And Minsky continued, telling him that the world is built a certain way, and the most important thing we can do with the world is avoid randomness, and figure out ways by which things can be planned. Wisdom like this has its effect on seventeen-year-old freshmen, and from then on Sussman was hooked.]" [1] http://spetharrific.tumblr.com/post/26600309788/sussman-attains-enlightenment http://spetharrific.tumblr.com/post/26600309788/sussman-atta...
  - dandrews 11y ago
    That sounds like the version told in Levy's Hackers. Maybe someone in HN-land can verify that; I can't find my copy.
    - tashi 11y ago
      Verified. Chapter 6, page 117 in my paperback edition.
    - dTal 11y ago
      Someone posted this elsewhere in the thread: https://web.archive.org/web/20120717041345/http://sch57.msk.ru/~khim/hackers/part1/chapter6.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120717041345/http://sch57.msk....
  - dTal 11y ago
    I had no idea that koan was a (mostly) true story. Thanks a lot for posting.
    - kkylin 11y ago
      Yes, I had once asked GJS about that exactly that story, and he confirmed it (though maybe not the exact words).
EdwardCoffin 11y ago
Danny Hillis: "The first time I met Marvin Minsky: I walked into his office, I was very intimidated. He was sitting there, he was throwing wadded up pieces of paper at a wastebasket across the room, and doing a terrible job of it. He's missing it, they're all falling short. So I watch this for a while. Then he looked up at me and said 'ah! I forgot! It's one half em gee squared!'" - From his talk On Game Software Development, in 2001 I think (from Technetcast.com)
- josteink 11y ago
  Maybe I'm wrong, but that sounds like he was trying to get the formula for kinetic energy, which would be half em vee squared. Just to be clear: I'm not questioning the story, just the details in the recollection :)
  - EdwardCoffin 11y ago
    I did wonder at the discrepancy at the time, so I re-listened to the audio several times carefully when I was writing the transcript above. To me, he is clearly saying gee rather than vee (could be an artifact of the recording though). I'm sure Hillis knows more physics than I do (though I knew the equations of motion pretty well at one time), but he could easily have just mis-spoke. I didn't pursue this line of thought, but considered it might have been something to do with him deriving an expression for the vertical position in a gravitational field, perhaps in terms of horizontal motion or something.
evanb 11y ago
Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children. --Marvin Minsky http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/sciam.inherit.html http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/sciam.inherit.html
gohrt 11y ago
It is now several decades later. Do TensorFlow/CNN builders use random initial configurations, or custom designed stuctures?
- argonaut 11y ago
  Usually random drawn from a certain distribution (ex: Gaussian with std. deviation 0.001, or a std. deviation dependent on the number of input/output units (Xavier initialization)). For some tasks, you may wish to initialize using a network that was already trained on a different dataset, if you have reason to believe the new training task is similar to the previous task.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Houshalter 11y ago
  NN weights need to start random because otherwise two weights with exactly the same value can get "stuck" and be unable to differentiate. Backpropagation relies on starting random patterns that kind of match so that it can fine tune them. But the weights are often initialized to be really close to zero.
  - brianpgordon 11y ago
    Given the era though, Sussman may have actually been working with a neural net that's not the typical hidden-layer variety. "Randomly wired" could be a statement about the topography of the network, not about the weights.
    - argonaut 11y ago
      There is no evidence he was actually working with a neural net. https://web.archive.org/web/20120717041345/http://sch57.msk.ru/~khim/hackers/part1/chapter6.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120717041345/http://sch57.msk....
      - 11y ago
georgespencer 11y ago
I always loved this TED talk of his https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYsTv-ap3XQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYsTv-ap3XQ
- peter303 11y ago
  This is not the Prof Minsky I remember from 1970s where I was a MIT student. His mind was laser sharp then and could drill into the core of any problem.
  - copperx 11y ago
    It doesn't look to me like he's unfocused or forgetful on the video. What are you referring to exactly?
jes5199 11y ago
Amazingly, according to this 1981 interview in the New Yorker, Minsky's first neural net was itself randomly wired! http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/12/14/a-i http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/12/14/a-i "Because of the random wiring, it had a sort of fail-safe characteristic. If one of the neurons wasn’t working, it wouldn’t make much of a difference—and, with nearly three hundred tubes and the thousands of connections we had soldered, there would usually be something wrong somewhere. In those days, even a radio set with twenty tubes tended to fail a lot. I don’t think we ever debugged our machine completely, but that didn’t matter. By having this crazy random design, it was almost sure to work, no matter how you built it."
areyousure 11y ago
Honest question: What does this koan mean? Specifically, what is closing one's eyes analogous to in the neural network? What is the recommended alternative action?
- Scarblac 11y ago
  Somewhere else is the thread is a closer rendition of how the actual exchange went. Using that, I finally understand the koan: Closing his eyes did not make the room empty. It made him not know which things were where. Randomizing the neural network did not remove all the preconceptions from the network. It made him not know what the network's preconceptions were.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

daughart 11y ago

Besides his contributions to computer science, his invention of the confocal microscope profoundly affected biology research and is still in wide use.

memming 11y ago
Wow, I didn't know that he invented confocal!

julianpye 11y ago

Isaac Asimov: "The only people I ever met whose intellects surpassed my own were Carl Sagan and Marvin Minsky."

baddox 11y ago
That's high praise, although I guess he never met von Neumann.
azinman2 11y ago
Pretty egotistical to frame it that way of Asimov.
- paloaltokid 11y ago
  You are not Isaac Asimov. Therefore you cannot know his mind. So maybe he wasn't boasting at all.
  - azinman2 11y ago
    If that's true, then he needs to work on his language because it's easily interpreted that way. Either that or the GP needs to expand the quote.
  - HQWT93xCRh 11y ago
    Isaac Asimov wasn't any of the people he wasn't talking about either, so maybe he should've kept it shut about their minds, too. But that wouldn't make good banter.
- JshWright 11y ago
  Have you read much of what Asimov wrote about himself?
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  There are a bunch of adjectives I would use to describe Asimov, and egotistical is so far down the list I'd get bored listing them before I got to it. It seems likely to be a realistic and honest self-assessment, on the basis of the breadth, depth, and foresight, of Asimov's written work. If you're Usain Bolt, is it egotistical to say, "I'm probably the fastest runner in the world?" Why is intellect so much different? Sure, there's no precise measure of intelligence...but, someone with great intellectual achievement gets to, at the very least, lay claim to great intellect. It would be easily dismissed if said by someone much less accomplished. In this case, I just take it as a frank statement of belief. Regardless, I think it's safe to say Minsky was a great intellect, of a caliber not often seen.

hydandata 11y ago

What a sad day, he was truly one of the great minds of the twentieth century. Inspiration to generations. P.S. Web of Stories has an extensive, autobiography style interview with Marvin Minsky [1]. [1] http://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/1 http://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/1

saosebastiao 11y ago

RIP. I will always hold him as an inspiration. Of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neats_vs._scruffies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neats_vs._scruffies I find it interesting because Minsky did a lot of the foundational work in Neural Network research yet he philosophically identified as the opposite on the Neat/Scruffy spectrum of most NN researchers today. Much like Bayes, I think there is some immense wisdom from his research that will not even be acknowledged as wisdom for decades.

qmalzp 11y ago
I reckon Scruffy is good for inventing a new field, Neat is good for pushing it to the limit.
proc0 11y ago
I think that's interesting as well. I would have guessed he was a Neat from his talks and his admiration of AGI because it implies he agrees there will have to be a succinct theory of general intelligence/consciousness.
- saosebastiao 11y ago
  I would probably guess that he believed in an eventual theory of general intelligence/consciousness, but probably not that it will be easy/succinct/simple. For example, Neural Networks have made extreme breakthroughs in sensory perception and classification, partly through modeling how humans perceive and classify. But do those theories extend over to other areas of intelligence like Planning? Creative capabilities? Emotion? Empathy? Especially if we know that there are other players (such as hormones, genetics, epigenetics, culture, etc.) beyond Neurons in those areas? The fact of the matter is that there are countless factors in how intelligence develops, let alone influence the development of all of the auxiliary functions for intelligence (such as memory, reflexes, sensory, etc.). EDIT: You can get a little intro to his thoughts on the matter starting about 27:16 in this video [1] (linked at the time marker). If you watch for about 10 minutes, he demonstrates some of the difficulties of using single abstractions for something as complex as human intelligence. [1] https://youtu.be/-pb3z2w9gDg?t=1636 https://youtu.be/-pb3z2w9gDg?t=1636

ffk 11y ago

Admin, can we get a black bar for this? Marvin Minsky is widely referred to as the "Founding Father of AI."

Eliezer 11y ago
I can't imagine who deserves a black bar if Minsky doesn't, unless a grey bar would be more appropriate (Minsky was signed up for cryonics with Alcor, so he's not dead dead.)
- rbanffy 11y ago
  When he's uploaded, who owns the copyright of this mind? Should it be considered a derivative work from his education?
  - Eliezer 11y ago
    Uh, Minsky does?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - rbanffy 11y ago
      This debate will be an interesting one. I imagine life insurance companies demanding their money back if the once deceased person is alive again. Also, how would inheritance work if heirs can spawn multiple instances of themselves that may not act as a single collective (and inheriting copyright may fit here). It'll be fun.
- reality_hacker 11y ago
  > I can't imagine who deserves a black bar if Minsky doesn't Have you chance to elaborate why this guy deserved this? Did he build first neural network, lisp machine, ALICE chatbot, break image net. I always considered him as some kind of celebrity from science, while other guys, which names nobody remembers, actually pushed AI movement by doing real things, while working on Google Brain, Watson, cyc, trying to catch spam, terrorists and fraudsters.

ggreer 11y ago

Interesting fact: Minsky is an Alcor member[1], so he's probably being cryopreserved right now. Though if he died from a cerebral hemorrhage, I'm not sure how well they'll be able to preserve his brain. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcor_Life_Extension_Foundation#Membership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcor_Life_Extension_Foundatio...

reasonattlm 11y ago
One can hope that they'll make the attempt regardless. Alcor's position is to carry out their directive from a member regardless of third party opinions on viability where they can, as having the reputation for doing this minimizes the very real problem of interference from family members (for reasons economic, religious, etc). Also it is very hard to say at the time (as time is critical) how much damage is done via fatal brain injury of this nature, and of course at this point next to impossible to say what that will do the the odds and difficulty of future restoration. Brain injury kept Roy Walford from being cryopreserved, though there it was clearly an extension of his own thoughts on the matter: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=24045 http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=24045 I see that as a terrible shame; it is guessing in advance as to the limits of what can be restored.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  Agreed. Not trying guarantees failure; trying leaves some possibility of success.
  - Outdoorsman 11y ago
    Agreed...given the resources and money there's nothing wrong with hedging your bets...
samstave 11y ago
Ironic that he died from cerebral hemorrhage! EDIT: I find it ironic - as he was my first exposure to the science of mind and thought etc... I find it ironic that his own death was due to a failure of the brain/mind in some way given how much he has contributed to the idea of thought and mind in his career.

jonbaer 11y ago

"You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way." ... RIP ... The Society of Mind one of the best books.

mjklin 11y ago
After reading that book my imagination came up with a cartoon I doodled in my notebook. It was someone speaking at Minsky's funeral and saying "I know he thought my mind was just a bunch of simple machines like Builder, but he was still a pretty good guy." Not that I knew anything about him... it was just an impression.
physicsyogi 11y ago
I remember reading The Society of Mind in high school and being amazed by the ideas after reading his novel The Turing Option. I haven't thought about either in years. Looking back, maybe it's no surprise that I work in machine learning now.

rootbear 11y ago

Minsky used to give talks at the annual Boskone Science Fiction Convention. I heard several and enjoyed them greatly, he was an entertaining speaker.

waterlesscloud 11y ago
He also spoke at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston in 1989. The only time I got to see him speak in person.

jordhy 11y ago

This is sad beyond words. He was an admirable genius and a very candid person. May he rest in peace.

_pius 11y ago

We just lost a giant. Hard to imagine someone more black bar worthy for Hacker News, hope we have one up soon.

krapp 11y ago
I hope not. The black bar has become a meaningless exercise in political posturing. Edit: allow me to clarify - just having to choose whether or not someone is "black bar worthy" is distasteful. Ian Murdock didn't get a black bar that I can recall, and I don't remember seeing one since then, even though other people relevant to the community have died. Are we to expect someone to change the color of the bar every time a death in the tech community occurs, and how to we judge relevance in that regard? No, it's an arbitrary gesture that doesn't really honor anything or anyone. It just gives people something to argue about. Why did someone get a black bar and someone else didn't? Why was this person deserving of it, and not that person? It's best to just remove it altogether.
- euske 11y ago
  Just want to speak up and say that your comment is actually very sensible, and it's terrifying to see it's downvoted.
- tlrobinson 11y ago
  Out of curiosity, does anyone have a list of people who HN has enabled the black bar for?
  - tlrobinson 11y ago
    I went ahead and compiled a list of "black bar" memorials from what I could remember and a little bit of searching. (It's probably not comprehensive, but it's clearly composed of computing luminaries and members of the YC community) Dan Haubert (1984 - 2009) Robert Morris (1932 - 2011) John McCarthy (1927 - 2011) Dennis Ritchie (1941 - 2011) Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011) Doug Engelbart (1925 - 2013) Aaron Swartz (1986 - 2013) Gene Amdahl (1922 - 2015) Marvin Minsky (1927 - 2016)
- 11y ago

Eliezer 11y ago

I had the chance to walk with Marvin Minsky down a hallway once, and I asked him what he thought of Bayesian reasoning. He said that it seemed to him like it was still part of a general trend away from tackling the central problem in AI. I said I didn't think so, but he seemed tired so I didn't try to go into detail. There's an urban legend that I once got into a fistfight with Marvin Minsky, which does about as well as anything to illustrate the crazy, crazy things that people have been known to believe about me. We have temporarily misplaced a great mind. See you later, Professor Minsky.

rpgmaker 11y ago
I keep thinking about an article I read a couple of years ago about the two schools of thought in AI: the now popular Conventional AI and (I believe) Computational AI. The article was mainly about the lead proponent of computational AI and how, after he helped give birth to the AI field, he was in effect being ostracised because he didn't think conventional AI should be considered "intelligence" as we generally think of it. I'm paraphrasing of course but I'm wondering if Marvin Minsky was the subject of that article? It has been nagging me for a couple of months now and I just don't remember where did I read it or the name of the subject.
- nickbauman 11y ago
  What you're asking makes me think of Dijkstra's quote "the question whether machines can think as relevant as the question whether submarines can swim."
- aomurphy 11y ago
  Was it this one about Hofstader? http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-...
  - rpgmaker 11y ago
    That seems to be the one thanks! I think that the article had some "code samples" and this one doesn't... but I may be confusing it with another article about quantum computing.

chriskanan 11y ago

I think Minsky was the last living giant of AI that attended the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, which many cite as being the beginning of NLP, computer vision, machine learning, etc. Sad news...

finin 11y ago
Trenchard More of Dartmouth was also a participant and is, as far as I know, still alive
robotresearcher 11y ago
More than an attendee, he was one of the proposers. The proposal: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmou...

pyrrhotech 11y ago

Very sad and surreal, I happened to just be reading his Wikipedia page yesterday. I hope the cause of death does not prevent his cryopreservation. Say what you will about cryonics, but it definitely gives you a better chance of living again than internment or cremation. I hope the world will see his genius again.

ryanmarsh 11y ago

Favorite paper of his: Why Programming is a Good Medium for Expressing Poorly Understood and Sloppily-Formulated Ideas http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Why%20programming%20is--.html http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Why%20programming%20...

jonbarker 11y ago

Glad I was able to get to meet Marvin back in 2014. On cognitive neuroscience he was pessimistic, he likened it to telling a chemist to try and discern what a computer was doing by looking at the machine without the monitor. Really enjoyed that analogy.

ehudla 11y ago

One of my earliest exposures to CS was his Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines. "Communication with Alien Intelligence" is another favorite of mine. The idea of enumerating all possible Turing Machines and looking for ones that do something meaningful is brilliant.

Igglyboo 11y ago
Is the set of all turing machines finite?
- govg 11y ago
  No, but they can be put in a 1-1 mapping with the integers, making them countably infinite.
- qu4z-2 11y ago
  No, but it only needs to be countable, by my understanding.
gshubert17 11y ago
It is too bad that his book Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines is out of print.
- mindcrime 11y ago
  Very true, but FWIW, it's not too hard to find a copy, whether it's a used dead-tree copy (18 or more available on Amazon.com right now), or a bootleg PDF. The PDF version is on the popular e-book sharing sites.
igravious 11y ago
My father had a book by Minsky which I swiped from his bookshelf and read cover to cover. I can't for the life of me remember the title but looking over his bibliography I think it was this one. This book, if indeed it was this one, had a big impact on my younger self, though I'm ashamed of two things now: 1) I can't remember exactly what it was about it that affected me so, and 2) I don't know where the book is! I do remember the chapters about McCulloch-Pitts artificial neurons and Turing machines and the halting problem. I'd dearly love to find a copy of that book to see if my older self recognises what my younger self saw in it.

vonnik 11y ago

Some great sentences from 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. In general we are least aware of what our minds do best.

endlessvoid94 11y ago

Can we get a black bar for this one?

morenoh149 11y ago

thankfully MIT open courseware recorded one of his classes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pb3z2w9gDg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pb3z2w9gDg the society of mind class 6.868

dmschulman 11y ago

Minsky helped design one of the coolest musical gadgets I've ever come across, the Triadex Muse. Being a sort of self-generative music box, Minsky imagined a future where families would gather around such musical machines instead of turning to boring old television for their entertainment and relaxation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triadex_Muse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triadex_Muse

dang 11y ago

Here's a nice tribute by Philip Greenspun: http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2016/01/25/marvin-minsky-1927-2016-the-death-of-a-skeptic/ http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2016/01/25/marvin-minsky-1927..., via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10971472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10971472.

DonHopkins 11y ago

He was truly a brilliant and humble man, who wrote so much influential and interesting stuff! Here's one of my favorite papers by Marvin Minsky: Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious Marvin Minsky, MIT Abstract: Freud's theory of jokes explains how they overcome the mental "censors" that make it hard for us to think "forbidden" thoughts. But his theory did not work so well for humorous nonsense as for other comical subjects. In this essay I argue that the different forms of humor can be seen as much more similar, once we recognize the importance of knowledge about knowledge and, particularly, aspects of thinking concerned with recognizing and suppressing bugs -- ineffective or destructive thought processes. When seen in this light, much humor that at first seems pointless, or mysterious, becomes more understandable. http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt

DonHopkins 11y ago

Here's a video image from the POV of a robotic Dakin Bear of Marvin Minsky's son, Henry Minsky, who had a look of trepidation at the idea of sacrificing his Dakin Bear to one of his dad's robotics experiments. http://imgur.com/gcFVzpk http://imgur.com/gcFVzpk

idotob 11y ago

May he rest in perfect peace http://www.idotob.com http://www.idotob.com

proc0 11y ago

So sad. I wanted him to survive until a true AI breakthrough happens, which seems so close (granted for many decades now, but that's why).

luckydude 11y ago
If you look at what the cars are doing, I'm not an AI guy, but that deep learning that the cars are doing seems like something he might like. In my book that neural network stuff is AI.
- wittedhaddock 11y ago
  Machine learning is not Artificial Intelligence. Machine Learning is applied science. Artificial Intelligence is science.

gonzo 11y ago

I met Minsky once in February 1987, at a rally in Las Vegas to protest the Nevada Test Site.. A lot of famous people (Carl Sagan, Barbara Boxer, Tom Downey, Ramsey Clark, Martin Sheen, Kris Kristofferson) were there, but I'd gone to meet Minsky. I had taken along a (quite early) copy of the GNU Emacs manual. The FSF was selling them, but I'd put this one together myself. Running TeX on the texinfo source, converting the output for the Imagen printer, and then taking it to Kinko's to be spiral bound, including my imitation of the yellow cover that the FSF version had. I asked Minsky for his autograph. He looked at what I presented, understood what it was, an autographed inside the front cover, "Marvin Minsky, friend of Stallman". In April of 2011 in an airport in Honolulu, I presented that same manual for an autograph to Richard Stallman. He looked my manual over for a long time. IIRC, it documents Emacs version 16 or 17. Then he signed it, below Minsky's autograph, "Richard M. Stallman - Friend of Minsky" RIP, Marvin.

pavs 11y ago
Amazing. If possible, can you please share a picture of the autographs?
- joe563323 11y ago
  Yes. Please please please do share the picture of autographs.
ubersol1 11y ago
Interesting. But I wonder, was it a coincidence that you had the manual with you in Honolulu ? Or do you take the manual with you everywhere you go ? :)
- gonzo 11y ago
  I'd actually paid to fly Stallman to Honolulu to attend pfosscon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-lP8lPYPDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-lP8lPYPDU While he was in Hawaii, I also paid to fly him to the "Big Island" (Hawaii) to speak with people (mostly astronomers and their children, though some people drove up from Hilo.) https://blogs.oracle.com/barton808/entry/my_travels_in_hawaii_with https://blogs.oracle.com/barton808/entry/my_travels_in_hawai... Since I was paying for his ticket, I knew he would be at the airport. I lived in Hawaii at the time. Back in Las Vegas (where I lived at the time), the book, and emacs, were new to me. I took it to read then.

reviseddamage 11y ago

I'm trying to figure out who will play him in the Hollywood movie about him.

christianbryant 11y ago

K-Lines (Knowledge-lines). I still meditate on this idea, and Minsky's paper "K-lines: A Theory of Memory". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-line_(artificial_intelligence) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-line_(artificial_intelligenc...

eruditely 11y ago

> Underlying our approach to this subject is our conviction that "computer science" is not a science and that its significance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects. Mathematics provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of "what is." Computation provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of "how to." http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Why%20programming%20is--.html http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Why%20programming%20... https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/front/node3.html https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/front/node3.html From SICP preface, which is the quote that actually matters, this is inspired by Minsky's quote. I hate that the quote that went public were all the other less inspired quotes from SICP.

d0mdo0ss 11y ago

One amazon review for The Society of Mind says "The book has nothing to do with artificial intelligence. It has everything to do with speculation. And since no one has builty the society of mind from this blueprint in over 15 years, what does that tell us about the usefulness of the idea??" A"Marvin Minsky" replied: "It tells us that most AI researchers are still looking for oversimplistic solutions to problems. This reviewer does not understand that new ideas often take 2 decades to spread, because most practitioners in most fields don't oftenmake changes in their careers. The ideas in my 1961 "Steps toward Artificial Intelligence" became general practice aroun 1980, and those in "The Society of Mind," are only now (2007) becoming widely adopted."

myztic 11y ago
He also wrote a few product reviews http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A3145L3LF7U7F5/ref=cm_cr_pr_pdp?ie=UTF8 http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A3145L3LF7U7F5/ref=cm_c... ;)

mckoss 11y ago

As a grad student, I remember shooting the bull with Minsky and Hillis (1983). The CIA had offices across the hall and we were discussing how we might grab one of their bags of shredded documents and use a computer to piece together all the fragments by hashing the pattern of edge fragments on each piece.

waterlesscloud 11y ago
Which later became a real-life DARPA Challenge (solved). http://archive.darpa.mil/shredderchallenge/ http://archive.darpa.mil/shredderchallenge/ And, come to think of it, a variation was in the novel Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge.
- zimpenfish 11y ago
  There's an excellent chapter about it in http://www.glassner.com/portfolio/morphs-mallards-and-montages/ http://www.glassner.com/portfolio/morphs-mallards-and-montag...

anateus 11y ago

I got to spend some time talking with him once when we were both visiting the offices of OLPC in Cambridge, more or less across the street from MIT's building 32 where CSAIL is located. I told him a little about what I was working on (learning agents attached to dialogue systems) and he had some insights. I ran out to the coop to buy another copy of The Society of Mind and he signed it. We also talked a little bit about some of the ideas in his The Emotion Machine, which I hadn't read at that point. On top of his work, Minsky taught me that you should meet your idols. If they're worth it you walk away enriched and invigorated.

tuananh 11y ago

@seldo (CTO of npmjs) > True story: in my final essay of my AI module at uni, I disagreed with everything Minsky believed, so my professor, a fan, flunked me.

maze-le 11y ago

When I first came into contact with AI at the University, I really enjoyed reading his Essays. As A Undergraduate I wasn't really ready to read his papers, but publications like "Why People Think Computers Can't" and "Matter, Mind and Models" (wich where recommendations of my prof.) really got me interested in this field. Rest in peace, Mr. Minsky.

iMark 11y ago

He had a wonderful way of expressing ideas. This always resonated with me: "Minds are what brains do"

poseid 11y ago

RIP Marvin Minsky http://thinkingonthinking.com/marvin-minsky-passed-away/ http://thinkingonthinking.com/marvin-minsky-passed-away/

heyrhett 11y ago

While I was a student at MIT, I heard a rumor that Prof. Minsky in the 1960's thought computer vision was such an easy problem that he assigned it to a first year undergrad. I asked him if it was true, and he said that it wasn't true that he thought the problem was easy, but it is true that he had a first year undergrad student that he decided to put in charge of his grad students working on the problem. The first year student was Gerald Sussman.

EGreg 11y ago

Reading the comments here, I would have loved to meet the guy. I'm in my 30s and I've met and spoken to precious few of "the greats" of our generation. I feel like there are two phenomena going on: 1) We don't always know who is one of "the greats" of today's generation, until much later. 2) Today, content generation is so democratized (eg wikipedia, soundcloud) that there are less individual superstars like Pushkin, etc. 3) Even intellectuals who were once highly regarded would today have tons of comments on their blog nitpicking and debating every detail of what they said, with many of the comments being low quality. See eg Sam Harris vs Noam Chomsky debates. It seems like a world in which it's harder to be great like Alan Turing or Claude Shannon or Richard Feynman or Marvin Minsky. At the same time, maybe there are more great people than ever, and we just don't always know who they are until much later.

mhalle 11y ago

Danny Hillis introduced Marvin at the MIT Media Lab's 30th anniversary in October 2015, where they both participated in a remarkable panel discussion. Though not as strong and fast-talking as he once was, Marvin's humor and wisdom shine through. Here's a link to the video: http://www.media.mit.edu/video/view/ml30-2015-10-30-01 http://www.media.mit.edu/video/view/ml30-2015-10-30-01 Danny begins his introduction at about 41:29.

fuck_dang 11y ago

God, when I log on to HN in the morning and see that damned black bar I know it's going to hurt. But Marvin Minsky? My Tuesday wasn't ready for this. He has had such an impact on the field of AI, and even on the social dialogues about it. Not everybody thinks that robots are going to go Skynet on us, and a lot of us that realize that were informed by his work. Whether directly or indirectly, so much of his work has become common knowledge amongst AI enthusiasts and scientists. I'd be wasting my breath to say that he'll be missed, of course. I wish I could have met him.

elfyhat 11y ago

"If you like somebody's work just go and see them. However, don't ask for their autograph. A lot of people came and asked me for my autograph and it's creepy." -- Marvin Minsky (https://youtu.be/qJZ_1a-t_sA?t=1543 https://youtu.be/qJZ_1a-t_sA?t=1543)

wittedhaddock 11y ago

I audited a class on policy at the Harvard Kennedy School in October of 2015, and instead of going to class one day, we listened to a speaker (Jaron Lanier). After the talk, I stuck around in the front row and eavesdropped on people asking him questions. Eventually, one person came up to his side and asked "are you going to Marvin's house tonight?" I thought this person may have been talking about Minsky! So after Jaron responded with a "maybe" I approached this man and asked him if he was. And he did mean Minsky!! This man and I started talking about intelligence, ML vs. symbolic, and more... he truly knew many intricacies of AI! Eventually, for some amazing reason, out of nowhere he asked me if I wanted to come to Marvin's house that evening! Of course I said yes! At the time, the only paper I had on me was ironically Patrick Winston's thesis printed out in my backpack, so this man wrote the name "Henry Lieberman" (a colleague of Minsky's) on the cover and gave me Minsky's address! I went to Marvin's house that evening, and it was simply wonderful! We talked about SoM, and I was included in these discussions and was treated like a colleague. Marvin answered all my initial questions, but only created more within me! He engaged me! I really felt included. It was one of luckiest days in my life. I'm sharing because I'm reading other stories about people's encounters with Marvin, and while I was reading them I didn't feel as sad. Perhaps mine might do the same for someone somewhere.

xxcode 11y ago

I would go to Marvin's lectures - they were in the evening, like 7PM or so. This was early 2000's, and I was a grad student at MIT. I went to Patrick Winston, and asked him if it was worth going to Marvin's lectures given that I keep falling asleep. He said - of course, we all know you are overworked, but marvin may say something that will change your life.

richardboegli 11y ago

I recall reading a book by Rodney Brooks where IIRC he recounts his time in the MIT AI lab and how Marvin Minsky prose him certain problems to solve. I think this was in reference to a robot turtle or something to that affect.

bl4ckdu5t 11y ago

RIP Marvin. We're glad you've introduced what has become a great topic of interest to us today. AI just started getting even more interesting than ever since late last year and at least he lived to see that what he had started is what's gradually building the future we hope for