Marvin Minsky, in full Marvin Lee Minsky, (born August 9, 1927, New York, New York, U.S.—died January 24, 2016, Boston, Massachusetts), American mathematician and pc scientist, one of the crucial well-known practitioners of the science of synthetic intelligence (AI). Minsky gained the 1969 A.M. Turing Award, the best honour in pc science, for his pioneering work in AI.
Following service within the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1945, Minsky enrolled in 1946 at Harvard University to discover his many mental pursuits. After finishing analysis in physics, neurophysiology, and psychology, Minsky graduated with honours in arithmetic in 1950. In 1951 he entered Princeton University, and in that very same yr he constructed the primary neural community simulator. In 1954, with a doctorate in arithmetic from Princeton, Minsky returned to Harvard as a member of the celebrated Society of Fellows. He invented the confocal scanning microscope in 1955.
In 1957 Minsky moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to pursue his curiosity in utilizing computer systems to mannequin and perceive human thought. Among others fascinated about AI was John McCarthy, an MIT professor {of electrical} engineering who had developed the LISP pc programming language and contributed to the event of time-sharing pc programs (programs wherein a number of customers work together with a single mainframe pc). In 1959 Minsky and McCarthy cofounded the Artificial Intelligence Project (now the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). It rapidly turned one of many preeminent analysis centres and coaching grounds for the nascent area of AI. Minsky remained at MIT for the remainder of his profession, turning into Donner Professor of Science in 1974 and Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences on the MIT Media Laboratory in 1990.
Minsky outlined AI as “the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men.” Despite some early successes, AI researchers discovered it more and more tough to seize the exterior world within the chilly, arduous syntax of even probably the most highly effective pc programming languages. In 1975 Minsky developed the idea of “frames” to establish exactly the final data that should be programmed into a pc earlier than contemplating particular instructions. For instance, if a system needed to navigate via a sequence of rooms linked by doorways, Minsky recommended that the body would wish to articulate the related vary of prospects for doorways—in different phrases, all of the commonsense data {that a} baby brings to bear when confronting a door: that the door might swing both manner on a hinge, that the door can open and shut, and {that a} door knob might need to be turned earlier than pushing or pulling to open the door. Frames proved to be a wealthy idea amongst AI researchers, although making use of it to extremely advanced conditions has proved tough.
Based on his experiences with frames and developmental baby psychology, Minsky wrote The Society of Mind (1985), wherein he offered his view of the thoughts as composed of particular person brokers performing primary features, comparable to steadiness, motion, and comparability. However, critics contend that the “society of mind” concept is most accessible to laypeople and barely helpful to AI researchers. Minsky’s different books embrace Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry (1969; cowritten with Seymour Papert) and The Emotion Machine (2006), wherein he proposed theories about higher-level human feelings.
Minsky was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. In addition to the A.M. Turing Award, he obtained the Japan Prize (1990) and the Benjamin Franklin Medal (2001).