Minsky, Marvin

1927–

Artificial Intelligence Pioneer, Scientist, Author

Marvin Minsky is considered by most to be the father of artificial intelligence (AI). He is credited with coining the term in the late 1950s, when he was participating in much of the field's founding research, including the creation of the first mechanical neural network. In 1959, he and fellow Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor John McCarthy formed the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where even today the most important research in the field is conducted. Since then, Minsky has made crucial contributions to all spheres of AI theory, in addition to making important contributions to a wide array of other fields like robotics, mathematics, virtual reality (VR), and even space exploration. His work has led to both theoretical and practical breakthroughs in AI, cognitive psychology, neural networks, VR telepresence, and the theory of Turing Machines. He has long been a forceful presence at MIT's famed Media Lab as well, and even co-wrote a science fiction novel with genre stalwart Harry Harrison, called The Turing Option (1992), that integrates his AI theories.

Minsky was born in New York, the son of an ophthalmologist. He was raised in a home that was “full of lenses, prisms and diaphragms,” as he would write in 1988, in an essay detailing his invention of the confocal scanning microscope. “I took all his instruments apart,” he wrote, referring to his father, “and he quietly put them together again.” After attending the Bronx High School of Science in New York and the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, Minsky served in the navy from 1944 to 1945. Then, in 1946, Minsky attended Harvard, where the 19-year-old took up undergraduate studies in mathematics, neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, psychology, and classical mechanics.

In 1951, he went to graduate school at Princeton, where he wrote a theoretical thesis on “connectionistic” learning machines, based on early nerve-cell science, and built the SNARC (Stochastic Neural-Analog Reinforcement Computer), the world's first artificial neural network, which simulated the learning process that a mouse goes through as it walks through a maze. It was all simply a way for Minsky to build on a lifelong fascination that would come to define a career that began when he became an assistant professor of [Page 319]mathematics at MIT in 1957, and which has continued there ever since.

“As long as I can remember,” Minsky would write, “I was entranced by all kinds of machinery—and, early in my college years, tried to find out how the great machines that we call brains managed to feel and learn and think.” However, he soon learned that brain science was mostly uncharted territory, and if he really wanted to learn, he would have to blaze most of the trails himself.

Author Stewart Brand has described Minsky as resembling a bald eagle, “complete with predator's gaze,” albeit one with a personal devilish style and a “fearless, amused intellect creating the new by teasing taboos.” No idea was so taboo as the idea that humans should build thinking machines that might one day outstrip our own talents, intellects, and abilities, but Minsky was never deterred from this task.

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