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Coming from Alan Kay i definitely need to check these out. If I'd read this post a year ago I would have known almost none of the authors, but after reading "Ha

Coming from Alan Kay i definitely need to check these out. If I'd read this post a year ago I would have known almost none of the authors, but after reading "Hackers: the heroes of the computer revolution" earlier, these are all names that stood out right away. Both Minsky and McCarthy seem like almost mythical figures in the book, and I don't think I could ever hold aa candle to them, but the next best thing is probably to understand their thinking. I think it's a bit easy for us to get caught up in the medium blog posts detailing a small segment of a new framework, when what we really ought to do to grow, is go back to the basics and understand them in-depth.

mikekchar 7y ago
Another great book by Minsky is Perceptrons. It's really short to boot, IIRC. It is an especially good book for those interested in ML. In it Minsky shows that single layer neural nets can not compute all problems. I remember that he has a caveat somewhere that he hasn't thought about multi-layer neural nets and they they may still be interesting. So great was the impact of this that hardly anyone worked on neural nets for something like a decade afterwards. But it's a brilliant book presented in a really simple style. It's a piece of history, I think.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Also Marvin Minsky's hilarious paper: Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious. More fun than a barrel of an infinite number of monkeys. https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt 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. A gentleman entered a pastry-cook's shop and ordered a cake; but he soon brought it back and asked for a glass of liqueur instead. He drank it and began to leave without having paid. The proprietor detained him. "You've not paid for the liqueur." "But I gave you the cake in exchange for it." "You didn't pay for that either." "But I hadn't eaten it". --- from Freud (1905). "Yields truth when appended to its own quotation" yields truth when appended to its own quotation. --W. V. Quine A man at the dinner table dipped his hands in the mayonnaise and then ran them through his hair. When his neighbor looked astonished, the man apologized: "I'm so sorry. I thought it was spinach." [Note 11] Spinach. A reader mentioned that she heard this joke about brocolli, not mayonnaise. This is funnier, because it transfers a plausible mistake into an implausible context. In Freud's version the mistake is already too silly: one could mistake spinach for broccoli, but not for mayonnaise. I suspect that Freud transposed the wrong absurdity when he determined to tell it himself later on. Indeed, he (p.139) seems particularly annoyed at this joke -- and well he might be if, indeed, he himself damaged it by spoiling the elegance of the frame-shift. I would not mention this were it not for the established tradition of advancing psychiatry by analyzing Freud's own writings.
- AndrewOMartin 7y ago
  I read it fairly recently, and I agree that it is both great and short. Regarding multi-layer neural nets Minsky says they're uninteresting as they could be declared with enough complexity to basically reimplement any existing logic circuit. What made multi-layer neural nets interesting again was a multi-layer training algorithm. There another interesting part, shortly after showing that single-layer neural nets can't implement the XOR function, Minsky shows that all that's required for a single-layer neural net to implement the XOR function is to add another column to the training set with specific values, effectively encoding the hidden layer back into the training set.
neilv 7y ago
The Levy "Hackers" book is what told me there were concentrations of other kids who liked to figure out and build things as much as I did. I eventually found my way to Minsky's class. It was nominally on one of his past books, but the class sessions often seemed to be him talking about whatever he was thinking about that day, as he worked on his next book. Minsky's "ten-year grad students" and unofficials were also great. Two of them were especially personable, and would wander around the lab, and strike up impromptu technical conversations with random other enthusiastic students. Which seemed unusual among grad students of my dotcom era, and maybe it was more old-school greatness, like the Levy book.
- benzible 7y ago
  Not a great day for Minsky's reputation. He's been named in connection with the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking allegations: https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epstein-unsealed-documents-name-powerful-men-in-sex-ring https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epstein-unsealed-docum...
  - neilv 7y ago
    I hope he's exonerated promptly. Best wishes to his family and friends in the meantime.
    - sitkack 7y ago
      I hope the truth comes out, risk of it getting buried along with Epstein.

mikekchar 7y ago

Another great book by Minsky is Perceptrons. It's really short to boot, IIRC. It is an especially good book for those interested in ML. In it Minsky shows that single layer neural nets can not compute all problems. I remember that he has a caveat somewhere that he hasn't thought about multi-layer neural nets and they they may still be interesting. So great was the impact of this that hardly anyone worked on neural nets for something like a decade afterwards. But it's a brilliant book presented in a really simple style. It's a piece of history, I think.

DonHopkins 7y ago
Also Marvin Minsky's hilarious paper: Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious. More fun than a barrel of an infinite number of monkeys. https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt 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. A gentleman entered a pastry-cook's shop and ordered a cake; but he soon brought it back and asked for a glass of liqueur instead. He drank it and began to leave without having paid. The proprietor detained him. "You've not paid for the liqueur." "But I gave you the cake in exchange for it." "You didn't pay for that either." "But I hadn't eaten it". --- from Freud (1905). "Yields truth when appended to its own quotation" yields truth when appended to its own quotation. --W. V. Quine A man at the dinner table dipped his hands in the mayonnaise and then ran them through his hair. When his neighbor looked astonished, the man apologized: "I'm so sorry. I thought it was spinach." [Note 11] Spinach. A reader mentioned that she heard this joke about brocolli, not mayonnaise. This is funnier, because it transfers a plausible mistake into an implausible context. In Freud's version the mistake is already too silly: one could mistake spinach for broccoli, but not for mayonnaise. I suspect that Freud transposed the wrong absurdity when he determined to tell it himself later on. Indeed, he (p.139) seems particularly annoyed at this joke -- and well he might be if, indeed, he himself damaged it by spoiling the elegance of the frame-shift. I would not mention this were it not for the established tradition of advancing psychiatry by analyzing Freud's own writings.
AndrewOMartin 7y ago
I read it fairly recently, and I agree that it is both great and short. Regarding multi-layer neural nets Minsky says they're uninteresting as they could be declared with enough complexity to basically reimplement any existing logic circuit. What made multi-layer neural nets interesting again was a multi-layer training algorithm. There another interesting part, shortly after showing that single-layer neural nets can't implement the XOR function, Minsky shows that all that's required for a single-layer neural net to implement the XOR function is to add another column to the training set with specific values, effectively encoding the hidden layer back into the training set.

neilv 7y ago

The Levy "Hackers" book is what told me there were concentrations of other kids who liked to figure out and build things as much as I did. I eventually found my way to Minsky's class. It was nominally on one of his past books, but the class sessions often seemed to be him talking about whatever he was thinking about that day, as he worked on his next book. Minsky's "ten-year grad students" and unofficials were also great. Two of them were especially personable, and would wander around the lab, and strike up impromptu technical conversations with random other enthusiastic students. Which seemed unusual among grad students of my dotcom era, and maybe it was more old-school greatness, like the Levy book.

benzible 7y ago
Not a great day for Minsky's reputation. He's been named in connection with the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking allegations: https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epstein-unsealed-documents-name-powerful-men-in-sex-ring https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epstein-unsealed-docum...
- neilv 7y ago
  I hope he's exonerated promptly. Best wishes to his family and friends in the meantime.
  - sitkack 7y ago
    I hope the truth comes out, risk of it getting buried along with Epstein.