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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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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
Often
Rarely
Tell
Complexes
Believe
Complex
Things
Envy
Thinking
Otherwise
Mathematics
Wishful
Ones
Theorems
Simple
Truths

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Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.
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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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Everything is similar if you're willing to look far out of focus.
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Eventually, robots will make everything.
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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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The brain happens to be a meat machine.
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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.
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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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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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In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.
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Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.
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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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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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You don't understand anything unless you understand there are at least 3 ways.
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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.
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The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.
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All intelligent problem solvers are subject to the same ultimate constraints - limitations on space, time, and materials.
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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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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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I bet the human brain is a kludge
Marvin Minsky