Communications of the ACM

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.