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Remembering Marvin Minsky

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Remembering Marvin Minsky Remembering Marvin Minsky Kenneth D. Forbus, Benjamin Kuipers, Henry Lieberman ■ Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers Kenneth D. Forbus of artificial intelligence and a renowned mathematicial and computer scientist, In his 1960 essay, Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence, Marvin died on Sunday, 24 January 2016, of a wrote: cerebral hemmorhage. He was 88. In A visitor to our planet might be puzzled about the role of com- this article, AI scientists Kenneth D. puters in our technology. On the one hand, he would read and Forbus (Northwestern University), Ben- hear all about wonderful “mechanical brains” baffling their cre- jamin Kuipers (University of Michigan), and Henry Lieberman (Massachusetts ators with prodigious intellectual performance. And he (or it) Institute of Technology) recall their would be warned that these machines must be restrained, lest interactions with Minksy and briefly they overwhelm us by might, persuasion, or even by the reve- recount the impact he had on their lives lation of truths too terrible to be borne. On the other hand, our and their research. A remembrance of visitor would find the machines being denounced on all sides Marvin Minsky was held at the AAAI for their slavish obedience, unimaginative literal interpreta- Spring Symposium at Stanford Univer- tions, and incapacity for innovation or initiative; in short, for sity on March 22. Video remembrances their inhuman dullness. of Minsky by Danny Bobrow, Benjamin Similar conversations are being held today. But the balance Kuipers, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Wal- has shifted. In the 1960s through the 1980s many philoso- dinger, and others can be on the sentient phers and physicists made public comments that AI was webpage1 or on youtube.com. impossible, and its seeming achievements illusory. Today, of course, physicists and philosophers are more likely to issue The photographs in this article were dire warnings about the dangers of AI. That shows just how taken at the AAAI-05 conference in far this young scientific enterprise has come since its found- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. ing, by Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Allen Newell, Herb Simon, and others, only 60 years ago. Marvin was a cognitive scientist before the term was invented. He looked to psychology, neuroscience, and biolo- gy for clues to how minds worked, pulling together disparate ideas through the lens of computation. While all of his work has been influential, his final book, The Emotion Machine, provides a grand synthesis that is worthwhile reading for anyone interested in AI. In popular histories, Marvin has often been caricatured as an enemy of neural models. Nothing could be further from 94 AI © for the of All ISSN © 2005, AAAI the truth. His interest in modeling brains as well as MIT campus. Marvin had created a vibrant, thriving minds was clear to all who knew him. For example, laboratory. He loved to play with ideas, with anyone it was Marvin who invited a freshly minted Ph.D., who was interested. He could often be found in the David Marr, whose thesis was a mathematical model Playroom, a large open space, riffing about AI or just of the cerebellum, to join the AI Lab as a research sci- about any other aspect of science or engineering (or entist. What Marvin could not abide were people science fiction). who did not clearly understand the limitations of Like many brilliant people, Marvin could be eccen- their models. Minsky and Papert’s analysis of percep- tric. For example, his basement was legendary for trons provided needed clarity, delineating important being a kind of Sargasso Sea of papers and artifacts. In theoretical limitations on them. In his preface to the fact, I saw a talk by a historian in the Playroom on second edition of Perceptrons, Marvin pointed out the history of Lisp that used it as a resource. The his- that Rumelhart and McClelland’s own data showed torian dated events in Lisp’s creation by treating Mar- that their networks could not learn exclusive-or with- vin’s basement as an archeological dig site, dating out exponential amounts of data, as he predicted. documents based on their position within layers of Similarly, Marvin was impatient with the primitive other papers. Marvin’s desk was similarly cluttered. neuroscience techniques such as single-cell record- This was a challenge for students who needed to get ings available for much of his life. The widespread a copy of their thesis to him to read, since the docu- adoption of imaging techniques by neuroscientists ment would quickly vanish into the morass. (People suggests that many modern researchers agree as to didn’t read on screen back then, there weren’t the power of analyzing larger-scale neural systems. enough computers around.) Students came up with I was lucky enough to start working at the MIT AI various ways to ensure that their document attracted Lab from the second week of my freshman year at Marvin’s attention. My technique was to use a tele- MIT in 1973, through the end of my Ph.D. work in phone cord to hang the thesis from the ceiling so 1984. Staying at the same institution was more com- that it dangled over the middle of his desk, at eye lev- mon in those days. AI labs were very few in number el, bobbing gently. But his comments, once you got — most universities didn’t have them. Such labs had his attention, were always insightful. access to resources, like computers and the ARPANET, Artificial intelligence has come a long way in just that most students didn’t have access to, even on the 60 years. The scientific and engineering triumphs 2016 © 2005, AAAI have alread changed our lives in many ways, and of ered b M rvi Minsky and S ymour P pert The this process will continue for the foreseeable future. skies opened! I realized that this was what I had been And in doing so, we will continue that voyage that looking for all along! Their computational methods Marvin and others started, to understand minds by demonstrated ways to model interesting and impor- building them. tant properties of the mind. Like calculus and differ- ential equations had transformed physics more than Benjamin Kuipers three centuries before, symbolic knowledge represen- tation and inference methods were beginning a his- Marvin Minsky was my advisor, and he was very torical transformation of the science of the mind. important in my life. Like calculus and differential equations had grown My story starts back when I was in high school, and evolved over centuries to become more and and my dad and I would take long walks, talking more powerful tools for doing physics (and so much about math, science, and the nature of the mind. We else), I knew that these methods would grow and agreed that this was one of the great scientific prob- evolve over the decades, and perhaps the centuries, lems of all time. I couldn’t wait to get to college, so I to become powerful enough to describe the mind. I could take a psychology course, and learn about the knew that this was what I wanted to spend my life science of the mind. on. Well, I got to college. And I took a psychology I became a phantom grad student in the Math course. And it was a crashing disappointment. The Department, with a picture on the bulletin board in interesting parts weren’t rigorous, and the rigorous Building 2, but physically at home in the AI Lab in parts weren’t interesting. So I decided I had guessed Tech Square. I was inspired by Marvin’s essays, by his wrong about psychology, and majored in mathemat- students’ theses in Semantic Information Processing, by ics. After college, I went to MIT for graduate school in class meetings in the iconic Minsky living room, and pure math. I was planning to be pure as the driven by discussions in the AI Lab Playroom. Most of all, I snow, committed to crystalline mathematical beau- was inspired by circulating drafts of the famous ty. “frames paper.” There, in a precursor to The Society of But in the spring of 1973, just as a lark, I took the Mind, Marvin laid out his vision for the organization graduate Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course of knowledge as rich descriptions of complex objects, 96 AI © 2005, AAAI situations, and events, rather than at the finer gran- help, and the situation resolved very much for the ularity of logical sentences. better. I am very grateful, and I try to pay it forward. Marvin agreed to be my thesis advisor, as I under- He also gave brief and pointed praise, that I still treas- took a project to understand knowledge of space, ure, for coming up with an idea that he really liked. specifically the large-scale space of the “cognitive Marvin had many different accomplishments, but map,” describing the structure of buildings and cities chief among them was being a founder of the field of at a larger scale than can be observed all at once. He AI. He and his colleagues started the process of creat- was a wonderful doctoral advisor for me, respecting ing the tools and ideas that are revolutionizing the my ideas, and giving me full freedom to pursue them. science of the mind. He was disappointed that we My priorities and my direction were deeply inspired haven’t come closer to achieving the goals of AI dur- by his thinking, but he never pushed me to do things ing his lifetime. his way. Someone quoted his advice on advising stu- Centuries ago, Newton and Leibniz created tools dents: “Make sure the students believe that all the and ideas that revolutionized the problem of physics, good ideas are their own.” and the work of understanding physics is still not Every month or so, as I worked on my thesis done.
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