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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
Making
Principal
Brains
Activities
Changes
Activity
Brain

More quotes by 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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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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Once the computers got control, we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we're lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets.
Marvin Minsky
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I bet the human brain is a kludge
Marvin Minsky
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In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.
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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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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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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I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience... How would they know?
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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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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Eventually, robots will make everything.
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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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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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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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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By the way, it was his simulations that helped out in Jurassic Park - without them, there would have been only a few dinosaurs. Based on his techniques, Industrial Light and Magic could make whole herds of dinosaurs race across the screen.
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, 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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One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.
Marvin Minsky