Personal Life
Minsky is an actor in an artificial intelligence koan (attributed to his student, Danny Hillis) from the Jargon file:
-
- In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
- "What are you doing?" asked Minsky.
- "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe," Sussman replied.
- "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
- "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play," Sussman said.
- Minsky then shut his eyes.
- "Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher.
- "So that the room will be empty."
- At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
Source
What I actually said was, "If you wire it randomly, it will still have preconceptions of how to play. But you just won't know what those preconceptions are." --Marvin Minsky
Minsky has three children: Henry Minsky, Julie Minsky and Margaret Minsky, who is herself a Doctor of Philosophy from MIT, with a special interest in Haptic technology. He also has four grandchildren: Gigi Minsky, Harry Minsky, Charlotte Minsky and Miles Steele, who now attends MIT as well.
Read more about this topic: Marvin Minsky
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality.... Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.”
—Dorothy Day (1897–1980)