27 Facts About Marvin Minsky

Marvin Lee Minsky was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence, co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts concerning AI and philosophy.

Marvin Lee Minsky was born in New York City, to an eye surgeon father, Henry, and to a mother, Fannie, who was 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, and a year later he and John McCarthy initiated what is, as of 2019, named the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Marvin Minsky was the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and professor of electrical engineering and computer science.

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

Marvin Minsky developed, with Seymour Papert, the first Logo "turtle".

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

In 1962, Marvin Minsky worked on small universal Turing machines and published his well-known 7-state, 4-symbol machine.

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

In 1986, Marvin Minsky published The Society of Mind, a comprehensive book on the theory which, unlike most of his previously published work, was written for the general public.

In November 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 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.

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 was that while humans are machines, they are machines in which intelligence emerges from the interplay of the many unintelligent but semi-autonomous agents that comprise the brain.

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 negative scenarios are "hard to take seriously" because he felt confident that AI would go through a lot of testing before being deployed.

In January 2016 Marvin Minsky died of a cerebral hemorrhage, at the age of 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.