Marvin Minsky Biography

Marvin Minsky is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory and author of several texts on AI and philosophy. He was a Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and Professor of electrical engineering and computer science. Marvin’s inventions include the first head-mounted graphical display and the confocal microscope. He developed with Seymour Papert the first Logo turtle. Marvin wrote the book Perceptrons which became the foundational work in the analysis of artificial neural networks. This book is the center of a controversy in the history of AI as some claim it to have had great importance in driving research away from neural networks in the 1970s and contributing to the so-called AI winter. Marvin was an adviser on the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and is referred to in the movie and book. In the early 1970s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Marvin and Seymour Papert started developing what came to be called The Society of Mind theory. The theory attempts to explain how what we call intelligence could be a product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. In 2006 Marvin published The Emotion Machine a book that critiques many popular theories of how human minds work and suggests alternative theories often replacing simple ideas with more complex ones. He holds a BA in Mathematics from Harvard and a PhD in mathematics from Princeton. In 1959 he and John McCarthy founded what is now known as the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

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