27 Facts About Marvin Minsky

Marvin Lee Minsky was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research in artificial intelligence.

Marvin Minsky co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory and wrote extensively about AI and philosophy.

Marvin Lee Minsky was born in New York City, to Henry, an eye surgeon, and Fannie, a Zionist activist.

Marvin Minsky attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and the Bronx High School of Science.

Marvin Minsky then served in the US Navy from 1944 to 1945.

Marvin Minsky was on the MIT faculty from 1958 to his death.

Marvin Minsky joined the staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1958; a year later, he and John McCarthy initiated what was, as of 2003, named the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Marvin Minsky was the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences as well as professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

Marvin Minsky's inventions include the first head-mounted graphical display and the confocal microscope.

In 1951, Marvin Minsky built the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, SNARC.

Marvin Minsky says that the biggest source of ideas for the theory came from his work in trying to create a machine that uses a robotic arm, a videocamera, and a computer to build with children's blocks.

In 2006, Marvin Minsky published The Emotion Machine, a book that critiques many popular theories of how human minds work and suggests alternative theories, often replacing simple ideas with more complex ones.

Marvin Minsky invented a "gravity machine" that will ring a bell if the gravitational constant changes, a theoretical possibility that is not expected to occur in the foreseeable future.

Marvin Minsky was an adviser on Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey; one of the movie's characters, Victor Kaminski, was named in Marvin Minsky's honor.

The first is through the depiction of a "useless machine": a device Marvin Minsky invented as a philosophical joke.

In 1952, Marvin Minsky married pediatrician Gloria Rudisch; together they had three children.

Marvin Minsky was a talented improvisational pianist who published musings on the relations between music and psychology.

Marvin Minsky was a signatory to the Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics.

Marvin Minsky was a critic of the Loebner Prize for conversational robots, and argued that a fundamental difference between humans and machines is that while humans are machines, they are machines in which intelligence emerges from the interplay of the many unintelligent but semi-autonomous agents the brain comprises.

Marvin Minsky argued that "somewhere down the line, some computers will become more intelligent than most people", but that it was very hard to predict how fast progress would be.

Marvin Minsky cautioned that an artificial superintelligence designed to solve an innocuous mathematical problem might decide to assume control of Earth's resources to build supercomputers to help achieve its goal, but believed that such scenarios are "hard to take seriously" because he felt confident that AI would be well tested before being deployed.

Marvin Minsky died of a cerebral hemorrhage in January 2016, at age 88.

Marvin Minsky was a member of Alcor Life Extension Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board.

Alcor will neither confirm nor deny whether Marvin Minsky was cryonically preserved.

Marvin Minsky won the Turing Award in 1969, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1982, the Japan Prize in 1990, the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence for 1991, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute for 2001.

In 2014, Marvin Minsky won the Dan David Prize for "Artificial Intelligence, the Digital Mind".

Marvin Minsky was awarded with the 2013 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category.