Marvin Minsky -- "Story/Mind" Consultant
![[Marvin Minsky]](../graphics/people/Marvin.gif)
(photo by Donna Coveny)
MARVIN MINSKY
Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
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Professor Minsky's research has led to both theoretical and practical
advances in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, neural networks,
and the theory of Turing Machines and recursive functions. He has made
major contributions to the scientific foundations of the
domains of symbolic description, knowledge representation, computational
semantics and linguistics, machine perception, symbolic and connectionist
learning, mechanical robotics and industrial automation.
In the domain of practical technology, Marvin Minsky has been one of the
leaders of intelligence-based mechanical robotics; he designed and
constructed some of the first mechanical hands, visual scanners, software
and computer interfaces and was a major influence on other robotic projects
outside of MIT. He was closely involved with the development of the
computer language LISP and designed and built the first LOGO "turtle." In
1951, Dr. Minsky built a machine called SNARC -- the first randomly wired
neural network learning machine, based on the reinforcement of simulated
synaptic transmission coefficients. Dr. Minsky is also the inventor of the
Confocal Scanning Microscope, an optical instrument with unprecedented
resolution and image clarity.
Often identified as one of the founders of the field of Artificial
Intelligence, Professor Minsky has worked since the early 1950s on applying
the powerful descriptive mechanisms offered by computation to
characterizing human psychological processes and on endowing machines
with the ability to act intelligently and adapt effectively. A co-founder
of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (with John McCarthy in 1961)
and a long tenure as its director and co-director (together with Seymour
Papert from 1963 to 1971) placed his imprint upon the entire field of
Artificial Intelligence.
Minsky's seminal contributions to Artificial Intelligence include: "Steps
Towards Artificial Intelligence" (1961) surveying a wide variety of work
and setting forth the major problems before the infant discipline; "Matter,
Mind, and Models" (1963) addressing the possibilities and problems in
self-aware machines or humans; Perceptrons (1969, together with Seymour
Papert) analyzing the capabilities and limitations of certain classes
learning and pattern recognition machines in an effort to put their
exploration on a more rigorous (and fruitful) foundation; and "A Framework
for Representing Knowledge" (1976) which put forth a model of knowledge
representation (called frames) accounting for phenomena in both language
understanding and visual perception.
In the early 1970s, Minsky and Papert began formulating a theory called The
Society of Mind which combined insights from developmental child psychology
with their and their students'
experiences of attempting to build intelligent machines. The Society of
Mind proposes that intelligence is the product of the managed interaction
of a diverse array of agents, rather than the product of any singular
mechanism. Such diversity is necessary, they believed, because different
tasks require fundamentally different mechanisms; the question to be
answered then becomes not what mechanism the mind uses but how it manages
the interaction of these diverse elements to yield coherent behavior.
Studies of children and their own experiences with programs argued
decisively against the existence or even possibility of any single unified
mechanism explaining human mental process; given this, the problem became
one of managing the messy diversity of The Society of Mind.
Bits and pieces of the theory emerged in papers throughout the 70s and
early 80s and in 1985. In the mid-70s, Papert turned his energies to
applying these new ideas about the structure of mind to transforming
education while Minsky continued to work on the theory. In 1985, The
Society of Mind was published. This book's novel composition of 270
interconnected one-page ideas reflects the structure of the theory itself;
each page either proposes an idea or mechanism accounting for some
phenomena or addresses a problem introduced by some adequate but incomplete
solution of another page.
Since the publication of The Society of Mind, Minsky has continued to
develop the theory in several directions. He is currently working on a new
book, "The Emotion Machine," describing the role that emotions play in
mental process viewed as a society of interacting agents. Emotions, in
this theory, are our names (as mostly external observers of our own
internal operations) for the economics and sociology of our mental
societies: the mechanisms, regulative forces, and interactions that keep us
enough in balance to survive but enough in flux to adapt.
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