Personal Life
Minsky is an actor in an artificial intelligence koan (attributed to his student, Danny Hillis) from the Jargon file:
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- 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.
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