Marvin Minsky and the pursuit of machine understanding - Making machines-and people-think [Spectral Lines

Abstract

Geniuses are meat machines-that’s how Marvin Minsky once characterized human beings-just like the rest of us, only much more efficient. And Minsky, who passed away in January, was certainly one of the most efficient meat machines this century or the last has ever seen. There are the curriculum vitae facts of his genius: the degrees in mathematics from Harvard and Princeton; the cofounding, with John McCarthy, of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory at MIT; the invention of the first head-mounted graphical display, the confocal microscope, and the first randomly wired neural network machine. He was a pioneering computer scientist, cognitive scientist, and roboticist, a fellow of IEEE and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of numerous honors and awards, among them the Turing Award, the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Pioneer Award, and the Franklin Institute’s Benjamin Franklin Medal. He left his mark on every field that captured his interest, moving through several with seeming ease before finding his life’s work: creating a theoretical framework in which to build machines that could understand as well as calculate.