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If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.

Marvin Minsky

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Marvin Minsky
Age: 88 †
Born: 1927
Born: August 9
Died: 2016
Died: January 24
Artificial Intelligence Researcher
Computer Scientist
Mathematician
Scientist
University Teacher
New York City
New York
Marvin Lee Minsky
Marvin L. Minsky
Understand
Something
Way
Would
Understood
Knowledge

More quotes by Marvin Minsky

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Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.
Marvin Minsky
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To say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there's something wrong with questions like, What caused the Universe to exist?
Marvin Minsky
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How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? There must be a hundred of them.
Marvin Minsky
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Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke's is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.
Marvin Minsky
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What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.
Marvin Minsky
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There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.
Marvin Minsky
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In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.
Marvin Minsky
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Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.
Marvin Minsky
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Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.
Marvin Minsky
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We turn to quantities when we can't compare the qualities of things.
Marvin Minsky
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Everything is similar if you're willing to look far out of focus.
Marvin Minsky
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One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.
Marvin Minsky
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This is a tricky domain because, unlike simple arithmetic, to solve a calculus problem - and in particular to perform integration - you have to be smart about which integration technique should be used: integration by partial fractions, integration by parts, and so on.
Marvin Minsky
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The brain happens to be a meat machine.
Marvin Minsky
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Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.
Marvin Minsky
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But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler's discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.
Marvin Minsky
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The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.
Marvin Minsky
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Experience has shown that science frequently develops most fruitfully once we learn to examine the things that seem the simplest, instead of those that seem the most mysterious.
Marvin Minsky
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Theorems often tell us complex truths about the simple things, but only rarely tell us simple truths about the complex ones. To believe otherwise is wishful thinking or mathematics envy.
Marvin Minsky
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But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it is works but what it does when it's stuck.
Marvin Minsky