Textbook of AI

1927–2016, Cognitive scientist; co-founder of MIT AI Lab

Also known as: Marvin Lee Minsky

Marvin Minsky was an American cognitive scientist who, with John McCarthy, co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1959 (which became the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, CSAIL) and led much of the field's early development. He was a co-author of the 1955 Dartmouth proposal that named the field, an attendee of the 1956 workshop, and one of the central figures of "first-wave" symbolic AI.

In 1951, while still a Harvard undergraduate, Minsky and Dean Edmonds built SNARC (Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator), a 40-neuron analogue device using vacuum tubes, almost certainly the first artificial neural network ever built. His 1954 Princeton PhD thesis was on neural-net learning theory.

With Seymour Papert he wrote Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry (1969), a rigorous mathematical analysis showing that single-layer perceptrons cannot compute XOR or any non-linearly-separable function. The book is often blamed (with some retrospective unfairness) for catalysing the first AI winter in neural-network research; Minsky and Papert themselves were careful to note that multi-layer networks could in principle escape the limitations they identified.

Minsky's mature view of cognition is set out in The Society of Mind (1986) and The Emotion Machine (2006): the mind is not a single unified process but a collection of small simple "agents" or "agencies" interacting in complex ways. He proposed the frame in 1974 as a knowledge-representation primitive, contributed to robotics (the Minsky Arm) and to mathematical analysis of recursive functions, and won the Turing Award in 1969.