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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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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
Take
Lisp
Would
Except
Already
Knew
Days
Anyone
Learn
Three
Fortran

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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Eventually, robots will make everything.
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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.
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The brain happens to be a meat machine.
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The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.
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An ethicist is somebody who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.
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Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.
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One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.
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The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all the other things we know. That's why it's almost always wrong to seek the real meaning of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.
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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.
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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.
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I bet the human brain is a kludge
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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.
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In science, one learns the most by studying what seems to be the least.
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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.
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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?
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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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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.
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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