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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
Learn
Three
Fortran
Take
Lisp
Would
Except
Already
Knew
Days
Anyone

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.
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I bet the human brain is a kludge
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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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Eventually, robots will make everything.
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The brain happens to be a meat machine.
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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.
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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.
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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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In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.
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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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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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How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? There must be a hundred of them.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.
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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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.
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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