In Memoriam | DOI: 10.1145/2892716 Lawrence M. Fisher
Marvin Minsky: 1927–2016
ideas with Papert’s understanding
of developmental psychology. They
worked both together and individually to develop theories of intelligence
and radical new approaches to childhood education using Logo, the educational programming language developed by Papert and his colleagues.
Together, they developed the first
Logo “turtle” robot.
Minsky’s best-known work from
the mid-1970s centers on a family of ideas he called the Theory of
Frames. In his paper “A Framework
for Representing Knowledge” (http://
bit.ly/1PezuKf), Minsky wrote, “the
ingredients of most theories both
in Artificial Intelligence and in Psychology have been on the whole too
minute, local, and unstructured to account—either practically or phenomenologically—for the effectiveness of
common-sense thought.” He tried to
address those issues by considering
several theories of intelligence, then
“pretending to have a unified, coherent theory” based on his proposal to
label data structures in memory as
frames and considering how frames
must work, individually and in groups.
Frames have become the primary data
structure of AI Frame Languages, and
are a major part of knowledge representation and reasoning schemes.
Minsky and Papert also developed
what came to be called The Society
of Mind theory, which attempts to
explain how intelligence could be a
product of the interaction of non-in-telligent parts. Minsky said his greatest 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,
Minsky published The Society of Mind
( amzn.to/1NOJ0lu), a book on the theory written for a general audience.
Minsky also wrote about the poten-
tial for communication with extrater-
restrials (“Communication with Alien
Intelligence,” bit.ly/1NOJ7xl), offering
arguments to support the notion that
AI laboratory, wrote several books on
AI and philosophy, and was honored
with the ACM A.M. Turing Award,
passed away on Sunday, Jan. 24, 2016
at the age of 88.
Born in New York City, Minsky attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston
School, the Bronx High School of Science, and Phillips Academy, before
entering the U.S. Navy in 1944. After
leaving the service, he attended Harvard University, where he earned a
bachelor’s degree in mathematics
in 1950. He then went to Princeton
University, where he built the first
randomly wired neural network learning machine, the Stochastic Neural
Analog Reinforcement Calculator
(SNARC), before earning his Ph.D in
mathematics there in 1954.
Doctorate in hand, Minsky was
admitted to the group of Junior Fellows at Harvard, where he invented
the confocal scanning microscope
for thick, light-scattering specimens,
decades in advance of the lasers and
computer power needed to make it
useful; today, it is in wide use in the
biological sciences.
He began teaching at MIT in 1958;
the following year, he joined John McCarthy in founding the MIT Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory (today known
as the Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL).
At the time of his death, he was the
Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and
Sciences, and professor of electrical
engineering and computer science, at
CSAIL.
Beginning in the early 1950s, Min-
sky worked on computational ideas
to characterize human psychological
processes, and produced theories on
how to endow machines with artificial
intelligence. Work in the new labora-
tory included attempts to model hu-
man perception and intelligence, as
well as efforts to design and build
practical robots.
Minsky had argued that space exploration, undersea mining, and nuclear safety would be vastly simpler
with manipulators driven locally by
intelligent computers or remotely by
human operators. He foresaw that
microsurgery could be done by surgeons who work at one end of a telepresence system at a comfortably large
scale while at the other end machines
do the chores required at the small
scale where tiny nerve bundles are
knitted together or clogged blood vessels are reamed out. In support of this,
Minsky designed and built mechanical hands with tactile sensors, and an
arm with 14 degrees of freedom.
In the late 1960s, Minsky began to
work on perceptrons, simple computational devices that capture some of
the characteristics of neural behavior.
Minsky and Seymour Papert showed
what perceptrons could and could
not do. Together they wrote the book
Perceptrons, which is considered a
foundational work in the analysis of
artificial neural networks.
Minsky and Papert continued their
collaboration for decades, bringing
together Minsky’s computational
Minsky worked on
computational ideas
to characterize
human psychological
processes, and
produced theories
on how to endow
machines with
artificial intelligence.
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