Top 62 Marvin Minsky Quotes
#1. 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.
Marvin Minsky
#2. The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.
Marvin Minsky
#3. We must see that music theory is not only about music, but about how people process it. To understand any art, we must look below its surface into the psychological details of its creation and absorption.
Marvin Minsky
#4. We'll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.
Marvin Minsky
#5. I heard that the same thing occurred in a scene in Alien, where the creature pops out of the chest of a crewman. The other actors didn't know what was to happen; the director wanted to get true surprise.
Marvin Minsky
#6. Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.
Marvin Minsky
#7. Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.
Marvin Minsky
#8. Listening to music engages the previously acquired personal knowledge of the listener.
Marvin Minsky
#9. If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.
Marvin Minsky
#10. It's ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute.
Marvin Minsky
#11. Everything is similar if you're willing to look far out of focus.
Marvin Minsky
#12. Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.
Marvin Minsky
#13. 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.
Marvin Minsky
#14. Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.
Marvin Minsky
#15. Around 1967 Dan Bobrow wrote a program to do algebra problems based on symbols rather than numbers.
Marvin Minsky
#16. General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.
Marvin Minsky
#17. Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.
Marvin Minsky
#18. 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.
Marvin Minsky
#19. In science, one learns the most by studying what seems to be the least.
Marvin Minsky
#20. Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws.
Marvin Minsky
#21. There are three basic approaches to AI: Case-based, rule-based, and connectionist reasoning.
Marvin Minsky
#22. An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.
Marvin Minsky
#23. We turn to quantities when we can't compare the qualities of things.
Marvin Minsky
#24. 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.
Marvin Minsky
#25. You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
Marvin Minsky
#27. What would a Martian visitor think to see a human being laugh? It must look truly horrible: the sight of furious gestures, flailing limbs, and thorax heaving in frenzied contortions ...
Marvin Minsky
#28. We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake - like putting a fork in one's eye or using a window instead of a door.
Marvin Minsky
#29. I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience ... How would they know?
Marvin Minsky
#30. 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.
Marvin Minsky
#31. But there's a big difference between "impossible" and "hard to imagine." The first is about it; the second is about you!
Marvin Minsky
#32. The nature of mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect ... it's only what we must expect from evolution's countless tricks.
Marvin Minsky
#33. I think Lenat is headed in the right direction, but someone needs to include a knowledge base about learning.
Marvin Minsky
#34. Daniel Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He's redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher.
Marvin Minsky
#35. Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men.
Marvin Minsky
#36. 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.
Marvin Minsky
#37. Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know.
Marvin Minsky
#38. If you just have a single problem to solve, then fine, go ahead and use a neural network. But if you want to do science and understand how to choose architectures, or how to go to a new problem, you have to understand what different architectures can and cannot do.
Marvin Minsky
#39. To say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there's something wrong with questions like, "What caused the Universe to exist?"
Marvin Minsky
#40. Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.
Marvin Minsky
#41. How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? There must be a hundred of them.
Marvin Minsky
#42. This is a tricky domain because, unlike simple arithmetic, to solve a calculus problem - and in particular to perform integration - you have to be smart about which integration technique should be used: integration by partial fractions, integration by parts, and so on.
Marvin Minsky
#43. In general, we're least aware of what our minds do best.
Marvin Minsky
#44. You don't understand anything unless you understand there are at least 3 ways.
Marvin Minsky
#45. Stanley Kubrick knew we had good graphics around MIT and came to my lab to find out how to do it. We had some really good stuff. I was very impressed with Kubrick; he knew all the graphics work I had ever heard of, and probably more.
Marvin Minsky
#46. 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.
Marvin Minsky
#47. Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!
Marvin Minsky
#48. 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.
Marvin Minsky
#49. Good theories of the mind must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billions of years in which our brains have survivied; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.
Marvin Minsky
#50. It would be as useless to perceive how things 'actually look' as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.
Marvin Minsky
#52. One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.
Marvin Minsky
#53. 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
#54. All intelligent problem solvers are subject to the same ultimate constraints - limitations on space, time, and materials.
Marvin Minsky
#55. Once when I was standing at the base, they started rotating the set and a big, heavy wrench fell down from the 12 o'clock position of the set, and got buried in the ground a few feet from me. I could have been killed!
Marvin Minsky
#56. The basic idea in case-based, or CBR, is that the program has stored problems and solutions. Then, when a new problem comes up, the program tries to find a similar problem in its database by finding analogous aspects between the problems.
Marvin Minsky
#57. Within 10 years computers won't even keep us as pets.
Marvin Minsky
#58. By the way, it was his simulations that helped out in Jurassic Park - without them, there would have been only a few dinosaurs. Based on his techniques, Industrial Light and Magic could make whole herds of dinosaurs race across the screen.
Marvin Minsky
#60. When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.
Marvin Minsky
#61. But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler's discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.
Marvin Minsky
#62. No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; but most of the time, we aren't either.
Marvin Minsky
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