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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
Days
Anyone
Learn
Three
Fortran
Take
Lisp
Would
Except
Already
Knew

More quotes by Marvin Minsky

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If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.
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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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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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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!
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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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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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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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One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.
Marvin Minsky
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Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.
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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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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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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In science, one learns the most by studying what seems to be the least.
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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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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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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In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.
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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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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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