Marvin Minsky dies at 88

I met Minsky once in February 1987, at a rally in Las Vegas to protest the Nevada Test Site.. A lot of famous people (Carl Sagan, Barbara Boxer, Tom Downey, Ramsey Clark, Martin Sheen, Kris Kristofferson) were there, but I&#x27;d gone to meet Minsky.<p>I had taken along a (quite early) copy of the GNU Emacs manual. The FSF was selling them, but I&#x27;d put this one together myself. Running TeX on the texinfo source, converting the output for the Imagen printer, and then taking it to Kinko&#x27;s to be spiral bound, including my imitation of the yellow cover that the FSF version had.<p>I asked Minsky for his autograph. He looked at what I presented, understood what it was, an autographed inside the front cover, &quot;Marvin Minsky, friend of Stallman&quot;.<p>In April of 2011 in an airport in Honolulu, I presented that same manual for an autograph to Richard Stallman. He looked my manual over for a long time. IIRC, it documents Emacs version 16 or 17. Then he signed it, below Minsky&#x27;s autograph, &quot;Richard M. Stallman - Friend of Minsky&quot;<p>RIP, Marvin.

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.<p>&quot;What are you doing?&quot;, asked Minsky.<p>&quot;I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe&quot;, Sussman replied.<p>&quot;Why is the net wired randomly?&quot;, asked Minsky.<p>&quot;I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play&quot;, Sussman said.<p>Minsky then shut his eyes.<p>&quot;Why do you close your eyes?&quot; Sussman asked his teacher.<p>&quot;So that the room will be empty.&quot;<p>At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.<p>RIP.

I had the chance to walk with Marvin Minsky down a hallway once, and I asked him what he thought of Bayesian reasoning. He said that it seemed to him like it was still part of a general trend away from tackling the central problem in AI. I said I didn&#x27;t think so, but he seemed tired so I didn&#x27;t try to go into detail.<p>There&#x27;s an urban legend that I once got into a fistfight with Marvin Minsky, which does about as well as anything to illustrate the crazy, crazy things that people have been known to believe about me.<p>We have temporarily misplaced a great mind. See you later, Professor Minsky.

Interesting fact: Minsky is an Alcor member[1], so he&#x27;s probably being cryopreserved right now. Though if he died from a cerebral hemorrhage, I&#x27;m not sure how well they&#x27;ll be able to preserve his brain.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Alcor_Life_Extension_Foundation#Membership" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Alcor_Life_Extension_Foundatio...</a>

I audited a class on policy at the Harvard Kennedy School in October of 2015, and instead of going to class one day, we listened to a speaker (Jaron Lanier). After the talk, I stuck around in the front row and eavesdropped on people asking him questions. Eventually, one person came up to his side and asked &quot;are you going to Marvin&#x27;s house tonight?&quot; I thought this person may have been talking about Minsky! So after Jaron responded with a &quot;maybe&quot; I approached this man and asked him if he was. And he did mean Minsky!!<p>This man and I started talking about intelligence, ML vs. symbolic, and more... he truly knew many intricacies of AI! Eventually, for some amazing reason, out of nowhere he asked me if I wanted to come to Marvin&#x27;s house that evening! Of course I said yes! At the time, the only paper I had on me was ironically Patrick Winston&#x27;s thesis printed out in my backpack, so this man wrote the name &quot;Henry Lieberman&quot; (a colleague of Minsky&#x27;s) on the cover and gave me Minsky&#x27;s address!<p>I went to Marvin&#x27;s house that evening, and it was simply wonderful! We talked about SoM, and I was included in these discussions and was treated like a colleague. Marvin answered all my initial questions, but only created more within me! He engaged me! I really felt included. It was one of luckiest days in my life.<p>I&#x27;m sharing because I&#x27;m reading other stories about people&#x27;s encounters with Marvin, and while I was reading them I didn&#x27;t feel as sad. Perhaps mine might do the same for someone somewhere.

One amazon review for The Society of Mind says &quot;The book has nothing to do with artificial intelligence. It has everything to do with speculation. And since no one has builty the society of mind from this blueprint in over 15 years, what does that tell us about the usefulness of the idea??&quot; A&quot;Marvin Minsky&quot; replied: &quot;It tells us that most AI researchers are still looking for oversimplistic solutions to problems. This reviewer does not understand that new ideas often take 2 decades to spread, because most practitioners in most fields don&#x27;t oftenmake changes in their careers. The ideas in my 1961 &quot;Steps toward Artificial Intelligence&quot; became general practice aroun 1980, and those in &quot;The Society of Mind,&quot; are only now (2007) becoming widely adopted.&quot;

While I was a student at MIT, I heard a rumor that Prof. Minsky in the 1960&#x27;s thought computer vision was such an easy problem that he assigned it to a first year undergrad.<p>I asked him if it was true, and he said that it wasn&#x27;t true that he thought the problem was easy, but it is true that he had a first year undergrad student that he decided to put in charge of his grad students working on the problem. The first year student was Gerald Sussman.

Minsky helped design one of the coolest musical gadgets I&#x27;ve ever come across, the Triadex Muse. Being a sort of self-generative music box, Minsky imagined a future where families would gather around such musical machines instead of turning to boring old television for their entertainment and relaxation.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Triadex_Muse" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Triadex_Muse</a>

RIP. I will always hold him as an inspiration.<p>Of interest: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Neats_vs._scruffies" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Neats_vs._scruffies</a><p>I find it interesting because Minsky did a lot of the foundational work in Neural Network research yet he philosophically identified as the opposite on the Neat&#x2F;Scruffy spectrum of most NN researchers today. Much like Bayes, I think there is some immense wisdom from his research that will not even be acknowledged as wisdom for decades.

Besides his contributions to computer science, his invention of the confocal microscope profoundly affected biology research and is still in wide use.

I got to spend some time talking with him once when we were both visiting the offices of OLPC in Cambridge, more or less across the street from MIT&#x27;s building 32 where CSAIL is located. I told him a little about what I was working on (learning agents attached to dialogue systems) and he had some insights. I ran out to the coop to buy another copy of The Society of Mind and he signed it. We also talked a little bit about some of the ideas in his The Emotion Machine, which I hadn&#x27;t read at that point.<p>On top of his work, Minsky taught me that you <i>should</i> meet your idols. If they&#x27;re worth it you walk away enriched and invigorated.

Oh man... This is really sad news. I mean, don&#x27;t get me wrong, ANY death is sad news, especially for that person&#x27;s friends and family. But while I never knew Marvin Minsky personally, I&#x27;ve felt his influence on my life for a long time. AI has always been one of my favorite subjects, and he&#x27;s one of the forefathers of AI research and his presence looms large in the life of anyone connected to the field. So this feels like losing an old friend.<p>Not to mention that he was a brilliant mind, and his loss is a loss for humanity at large.<p>Anyway, RIP Mr. Minsky.

I think Minsky was the last living giant of AI that attended the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, which many cite as being the beginning of NLP, computer vision, machine learning, etc.<p>Sad news...

Here&#x27;s a nice tribute by Philip Greenspun: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.harvard.edu&#x2F;philg&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;25&#x2F;marvin-minsky-1927-2016-the-death-of-a-skeptic&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.harvard.edu&#x2F;philg&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;25&#x2F;marvin-minsky-1927...</a>, via <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10971472" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10971472</a>.

Favorite paper of his:<p>Why Programming is a Good Medium for Expressing Poorly Understood and Sloppily-Formulated Ideas<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.media.mit.edu&#x2F;~minsky&#x2F;papers&#x2F;Why%20programming%20is--.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.media.mit.edu&#x2F;~minsky&#x2F;papers&#x2F;Why%20programming%20...</a>

What a sad day, he was truly one of the great minds of the twentieth century. Inspiration to generations.<p>P.S. Web of Stories has an extensive, autobiography style interview with Marvin Minsky [1].<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.webofstories.com&#x2F;play&#x2F;marvin.minsky&#x2F;1" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.webofstories.com&#x2F;play&#x2F;marvin.minsky&#x2F;1</a>

Some great sentences from Minsky:<p>No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it&#x27;s doing; but most of the time, we aren&#x27;t either.<p>In general we are least aware of what our minds do best.

As a grad student, I remember shooting the bull with Minsky and Hillis (1983). The CIA had offices across the hall and we were discussing how we might grab one of their bags of shredded documents and use a computer to piece together all the fragments by hashing the pattern of edge fragments on each piece.

&gt; Underlying our approach to this subject is our conviction that &quot;computer science&quot; is not a science and that its significance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology ­ the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects. Mathematics provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of &quot;what is.&quot; Computation provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of &quot;how to.&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.media.mit.edu&#x2F;~minsky&#x2F;papers&#x2F;Why%20programming%20is--.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.media.mit.edu&#x2F;~minsky&#x2F;papers&#x2F;Why%20programming%20...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitpress.mit.edu&#x2F;sicp&#x2F;front&#x2F;node3.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitpress.mit.edu&#x2F;sicp&#x2F;front&#x2F;node3.html</a><p>From SICP preface, which is the quote that actually matters, this is inspired by Minsky&#x27;s quote. I hate that the quote that went public were all the other less inspired quotes from SICP.

Glad I was able to get to meet Marvin back in 2014. On cognitive neuroscience he was pessimistic, he likened it to telling a chemist to try and discern what a computer was doing by looking at the machine without the monitor. Really enjoyed that analogy.

He was truly a brilliant and humble man, who wrote so much influential and interesting stuff! Here&#x27;s one of my favorite papers by Marvin Minsky:<p>Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious<p>Marvin Minsky, MIT<p>Abstract: Freud&#x27;s theory of jokes explains how they overcome the mental &quot;censors&quot; that make it hard for us to think &quot;forbidden&quot; thoughts. But his theory did not work so well for humorous nonsense as for other comical subjects. In this essay I argue that the different forms of humor can be seen as much more similar, once we recognize the importance of knowledge about knowledge and, particularly, aspects of thinking concerned with recognizing and suppressing bugs -- ineffective or destructive thought processes. When seen in this light, much humor that at first seems pointless, or mysterious, becomes more understandable.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.media.mit.edu&#x2F;~minsky&#x2F;papers&#x2F;jokes.cognitive.txt" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.media.mit.edu&#x2F;~minsky&#x2F;papers&#x2F;jokes.cognitive.txt</a>

Reading the comments here, I would have loved to meet the guy. I&#x27;m in my 30s and I&#x27;ve met and spoken to precious few of &quot;the greats&quot; of our generation. I feel like there are two phenomena going on:<p>1) We don&#x27;t always know who is one of &quot;the greats&quot; of today&#x27;s generation, until much later.<p>2) Today, content generation is so democratized (eg wikipedia, soundcloud) that there are less individual superstars like Pushkin, etc.<p>3) Even intellectuals who were once highly regarded would today have tons of comments on their blog nitpicking and debating every detail of what they said, with many of the comments being low quality. See eg Sam Harris vs Noam Chomsky debates.<p>It seems like a world in which it&#x27;s harder to be great like Alan Turing or Claude Shannon or Richard Feynman or Marvin Minsky. At the same time, maybe there are more great people than ever, and we just don&#x27;t always know who they are until much later.

One of my earliest exposures to CS was his Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines.<p>&quot;Communication with Alien Intelligence&quot; is another favorite of mine. The idea of enumerating all possible Turing Machines and looking for ones that do something meaningful is brilliant.

I would go to Marvin&#x27;s lectures - they were in the evening, like 7PM or so. This was early 2000&#x27;s, and I was a grad student at MIT.<p>I went to Patrick Winston, and asked him if it was worth going to Marvin&#x27;s lectures given that I keep falling asleep. He said - of course, we all know you are overworked, but marvin may say something that will change your life.

&quot;You don&#x27;t understand anything until you learn it more than one way.&quot; ... RIP ... The Society of Mind one of the best books.

&quot;If you like somebody&#x27;s work just go and see them. However, don&#x27;t ask for their autograph. A lot of people came and asked me for my autograph and it&#x27;s creepy.&quot; -- Marvin Minsky (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;qJZ_1a-t_sA?t=1543" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;qJZ_1a-t_sA?t=1543</a>)

Very sad and surreal, I happened to just be reading his Wikipedia page yesterday. I hope the cause of death does not prevent his cryopreservation. Say what you will about cryonics, but it definitely gives you a better chance of living again than internment or cremation. I hope the world will see his genius again.

K-Lines (Knowledge-lines). I still meditate on this idea, and Minsky&#x27;s paper &quot;K-lines: A Theory of Memory&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;K-line_(artificial_intelligence)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;K-line_(artificial_intelligenc...</a>

Minsky used to give talks at the annual Boskone Science Fiction Convention. I heard several and enjoyed them greatly, he was an entertaining speaker.

When I first came into contact with AI at the University, I really enjoyed reading his Essays. As A Undergraduate I wasn&#x27;t really ready to read his papers, but publications like &quot;Why People Think Computers Can&#x27;t&quot; and &quot;Matter, Mind and Models&quot; (wich where recommendations of my prof.) really got me interested in this field.<p>Rest in peace, Mr. Minsky.

He had a wonderful way of expressing ideas. This always resonated with me: &quot;Minds are what brains do&quot;

Danny Hillis introduced Marvin at the MIT Media Lab&#x27;s 30th anniversary in October 2015, where they both participated in a remarkable panel discussion.<p>Though not as strong and fast-talking as he once was, Marvin&#x27;s humor and wisdom shine through.<p>Here&#x27;s a link to the video: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.media.mit.edu&#x2F;video&#x2F;view&#x2F;ml30-2015-10-30-01" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.media.mit.edu&#x2F;video&#x2F;view&#x2F;ml30-2015-10-30-01</a><p>Danny begins his introduction at about 41:29.

RIP Marvin Minsky <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thinkingonthinking.com&#x2F;marvin-minsky-passed-away&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thinkingonthinking.com&#x2F;marvin-minsky-passed-away&#x2F;</a>

Here&#x27;s a video image from the POV of a robotic Dakin Bear of Marvin Minsky&#x27;s son, Henry Minsky, who had a look of trepidation at the idea of sacrificing his Dakin Bear to one of his dad&#x27;s robotics experiments.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;gcFVzpk" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;gcFVzpk</a>

thankfully MIT open courseware recorded one of his classes <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-pb3z2w9gDg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-pb3z2w9gDg</a> the society of mind class 6.868

@seldo (CTO of npmjs)<p>&gt; True story: in my final essay of my AI module at uni, I disagreed with everything Minsky believed, so my professor, a fan, flunked me.

So sad. I wanted him to survive until a true AI breakthrough happens, which seems so close (granted for many decades now, but that&#x27;s why).

This is sad beyond words. He was an admirable genius and a very candid person. May he rest in peace.

I&#x27;m trying to figure out who will play him in the Hollywood movie about him.

Admin, can we get a black bar for this? Marvin Minsky is widely referred to as the &quot;Founding Father of AI.&quot;

Isaac Asimov: &quot;The only people I ever met whose intellects surpassed my own were Carl Sagan and Marvin Minsky.&quot;

God, when I log on to HN in the morning and see that damned black bar I know it&#x27;s going to hurt.<p>But Marvin Minsky? My Tuesday wasn&#x27;t ready for this. He has had such an impact on the field of AI, and even on the social dialogues about it. Not everybody thinks that robots are going to go Skynet on us, and a lot of us that realize that were informed by his work. Whether directly or indirectly, so much of his work has become common knowledge amongst AI enthusiasts and scientists.<p>I&#x27;d be wasting my breath to say that he&#x27;ll be missed, of course. I wish I could have met him.

We just lost a giant.<p>Hard to imagine someone more black bar worthy for Hacker News, hope we have one up soon.

Can we get a black bar for this one?