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The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

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
Activities
Changes
Activity
Brain
Making
Principal
Brains

More quotes by 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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It's ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute.
Marvin Minsky
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General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.
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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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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We wanted to solve robot problems and needed some vision, action, reasoning, planning, and so forth. We even used some structural learning, such as was being explored by Patrick Winston.
Marvin Minsky
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Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!
Marvin Minsky
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One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.
Marvin Minsky
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I believed in realism, as summarized by John McCarthy's comment to the effect that if we worked really hard, we'd have an intelligent system in from four to four hundred years.
Marvin Minsky
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It would be as useless to perceive how things 'actually look' as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.
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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Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws.
Marvin Minsky
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The brain happens to be a meat machine.
Marvin Minsky
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No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing but most of the time, we aren't either.
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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Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.
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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If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.
Marvin Minsky
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Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.
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