Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky ( born August 9, 1927 in New York ) is an American researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. Together with John McCarthy, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon in 1956 he founded the Dartmouth Conference on the concept of artificial intelligence. Later, he and Seymour Papert was also founder of the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He has published numerous texts on this field, and on related topics of philosophy and also made some inventions. He is considered the inventor of the subsequently realized in confocal measurement principle (1957). Other inventions are mechanical hands and other parts for robots, the Muse synthesizer for musical variations together with Edward Fredkin and the first logo together with Seymour Papert Turtle. In 1951 he built with Dean Edmonds SNARC ( Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator ), a neural network computer that simulated the behavior of a mouse in a maze.
Biography
Marvin Minsky attended the Fieldston School and the Bronx High School of Science in New York. He later studied at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He made his 1944-45 military service in the U.S. Navy. At Harvard, he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1950 and his doctorate in 1954 in Princeton at Albert William Tucker ( Theory of Neural- Analog Reinforcement Systems and Its Application to the Brain Model Problem ).
Minsky since 1958 at MIT; there he researches and teaches to this day. In 1959 he founded with John McCarthy, the inventor of Lisp, an AI working group. The group to which it belonged in the 1970s, many hackers ( including Richard Stallman ) was, from 1963 associated with the Project MAC ( for Project Mathematics and Computation, later for Multiple Access Computer ), the first under the direction of Robert Fano (up 1968) and then by JCR Licklider ( stood until 1971 ). In the 1960s, was also a lot of models of neural networks, perceptrons, research (the title of a book by Minsky and Papert ). The discovery of some fundamental shortcomings of such simple neural networks by Minsky and Papert in the late 1960s led to the fact that the research in this area all came to a halt and was revived only in the 1980s. In addition to AI research (for example in the areas of visual perception, robotics, language), a time-sharing computer system was developed. Only the ITS in the AI group, later successor of the CTSS system mentioned was working on a Multics. In 1970, the AI group split off and created the AI Lab at MIT, led by Minsky, who took many scientists by the MAC project, which was to become the Computer Science Lab at MIT. The AI Lab was in the late 1960s to a note world center of AI research. 1972 was Minsky from the management of the AI Lab at Patrick Winston. Minsky was also a member of the Media Lab at MIT in the 1980s. He is there today Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and professor of electrical engineering and computer science (Computer Science).
Throughout his life as a researcher Minsky has won many awards. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. In 1969 he won the Turing Award, the 1990 Japan Prize, 2001, the Benjamin Franklin Medal and 2014 the Dan David Prize. For his contributions to optics, he received the RW Wood Prize.
Minsky's critics doubt the seriousness of many of his predictions. So he predicted that it would soon be possible " to program emotions into a machine inside ." In 1970 he declared that there would be three to eight years machines with the average intelligence of people who read Shakespeare and would be waiting cars.
Minsky deplored last the current development of AI research, since statistical learning method would be used increasingly instead of working on a comprehensive modeling of cognitive agents out.
Minsky is a member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
The author Bas Kast, who attended as a student Minsky's Society of Mind Seminar, writes about Minsky, he was " a colorful character, and hardly anyone who meets him, the impression can help thinking that it is with him a genius is. "
His doctoral include Manuel Blum, Daniel Bobrow, Carl Hewitt, Scott Fahlman, Danny Hillis, Joel Moses, Gerald Jay Sussman, Terry Winograd, Berthold Horn, James Slagle, Patrick Winston and Eugene Charniak.
Society Of Mind
In his book The Society of Mind ( German title: Mentopolis ) Minsky introduced in 1986 the theory that intelligence consists of an interwoven network of unintelligent agents. Only through the cooperation of relatively simple agents arises intelligence. Minsky tried the reader from the ordinary notion dissuade that the human brain is a single, large monolithic entity that is thinking about something or just does not think. Instead, a model is outlined, in which the brain of numerous, diverse, but is relatively simple agents.
These agents have simple tasks and goals. Only by communicating with each other and a Ausverhandeln the needs of the individual agents to each other arising thought and action.
Individual agents can again consist of even smaller agents, which in turn communicate with each other and negotiate. The small agents are specialized for certain tasks, such as the eye to see, or a brain area to ensure there are sufficient sleep. Conflicts within an agent lead to the weakening of this agent, which attract other agents upper hand.
Learning consists of this model is to improve the communication between the agents. Personal idiosyncrasies of people result from the different weights of the agents. The memory storage is made possible by the production of K- lines. These lines are a type K list containing all of the agents who participated in an activity.
Publications
- Neural Nets and the Brain Model Problem, Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 1954
- Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, Prentice- Hall, 1967
- Semantic Information Processing, MIT Press, 1968
- Perceptrons with Seymour Papert, MIT Press, 1969
- Artificial Intelligence, with Seymour Papert, Univ. of Oregon Press, 1972
- Robotics, Doubleday, 1986
- The Society of Mind, Simon and Schuster, 1987 Mentopolis, Klett- Cotta Verlag, Stuttgart 1990, ISBN 3-608-93117-1
- The Turing Option, with Harry Harrison, Heyne Verlag, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-453-11912-6