Artificial Intelligence Pioneer Marvin Minsky Has Died
Marvin Minsky died Sunday night of a brain haemorrhage. The former Turing Award winner and founding father in the field of artificial intelligence has turned 88. During his lifetime, he devoted himself to bringing logic to machines.
Minsky was a computer science professor at MIT. In 1959 he started the Artificial Intelligence Project at that university, together with another founder in the field of artificial intelligence, John McCarthy. He also developed part of the Society of Mind theory that argues that “intelligence is not a product of a single mechanism, but arises from the controlled interaction of a diverse array of imaginative resources.” Because of this, humans would not differ much from machines.
His last work was “The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind” from 2006. In it he describes how emotions do not differ much from thought processes. Minsky has said the book was intended to provide a suggestion about how the human brain works and how to create machines that experience thinking and emotions.
Minsky has several scientific achievements to his credit. For example, in 1963 he designed one of the first head-mounted graphical displays, the predecessor of VR glasses. He also developed some of the first visual scanners. In 1951 he built Snarc, the first randomly wired neural network machine.
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In 1956, he conceived and developed the first confocal laser fluorescence microscope, a high-resolution, image-quality optical microscope that is still used in biology science. With the confocal microscope it is possible to make sharper images of microscopic objects than with normal microscopes. Images are shot pointwise and rebuilt on a computer. This makes it possible to create a 3D image of a topologically complex object.
Minsky demonstrated the possibilities of giving computers logic. While working for MIT, he started working on Lisp, or the List Processing Language, a programming language that later became the standard for artificial intelligence research and development. He also devised garbage collection in which pieces of code that are not necessary at the moment are automatically removed from the working memory of the computer. He added this technique for automatic memory management to Lisp in 1959. The technology is still used in Java, for example.
Furthermore, during his studies in 1952, he devised and then made a machine in collaboration, which at the time was publicized as the most useless machine. The machine is a box with a button on it that turns the machine on. As soon as this happens, an arm comes out of the box and puts the button back in the off position. Then the arm disappears back into the box.
Minsky’s knowledge also prompted Stanley Kubrick to ask him questions about artificial intelligence in preparation for his film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Furthermore, Minsky made contributions in the field of mathematics and was a talented pianist. Marvin Minsky, who was born in New York on August 9, 1927, died of a brain haemorrhage on Sunday night at the age of 88.