I saw him in Seattle at a talk in the early 90s back when I was still a bank programmer. I remember he had kind of an authentic air about him, like a preacher who really knew what he was doing. You look at that guy and say "he's the real thing."
On 1/26/16, Jim Bromer <[email protected]> wrote: > I had "conversations" with Minksy in Internet Discussion Groups similar to > this one. Even though he was famously not a believer and I am we came to an > agreement that strong AI could be taken as proof of evolution or of > intelligent design. > > Jim Bromer > > On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 2:36 PM, EdFromNH . <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I did a year long independent study under Minsky my senior year at >> Harvard >> in 1969-70. He basically gave me a long reading list and made me promise >> to read every word of it and never bother him again. I did both. 1969 >> was >> the year Minsky supposedly showed that connectionist architectures were a >> dead end (his paper's was actually narrower than that, but its effect on >> government funding of connectionism was not). But despite Minsky's >> supposed condemnation of connectionism, the reading list he gave me >> included a fair amount about neural nets, and was largely about brain >> science (which I viewed as connectionist). The most important single >> paper >> I read in the reading list was a brief 4-5 page mimeograph of a >> typewritten >> article by Minsky on K-Line theory. (I assumed for years that K-Line was >> Minsky's idea, but Deb Roy of MIT's Media Lab told me in the early 2000's >> that someone beside Minsky originated it.) K-Line theory is a very >> simple, >> but powerful, model of a mind. It assumes the mind constantly receives >> sequential sensory information, records that sequential information, and >> as >> it does so it matches that information against past recorded sequences. >> As >> it does, it activates the more closely matching recordings, and generates >> from them, I assumed through generalization, the probable implications of >> the currently received information. For example, this let me understand >> in >> 1969 how it would actually be rather easy for a massively parallel K-Line >> machine to generate a sense of intuition, something that a considerable >> number of people in AI viewed as totally unexplainable for decades after >> that time. The other most important information I got from Minsky's >> reading list was just what a powerful, massively parallel, complex >> supercomputer the human brain was. In 1969 Minsky had been quoted as >> saying computers would be more intelligent than humans within several >> years. Because I understood what a supercomputer the brain was, and >> because my interpretation of K-Line theory required a computer with >> computational power somewhat approaching that of the brain, I believed >> then >> that machines with the intellect of humans would not be made until the >> power of computers was somewhere very roughly in the teraopp ranges, >> something that was many years away at that time. But I agreed with >> Minsky >> that artificial intelligence was totally doable, once the necessary >> computing power arrived -- which it very arguably has now. >> >> So, I owe a great intellectual debt to Minsky. >> >> On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 3:21 AM, Keyvan Mir Mohammad Sadeghi < >> [email protected]> wrote: >> >>> https://www.csail.mit.edu/node/2682 >>> >>> -- >>> Keyvan Mir Mohammad Sadeghi >>> MSc AI >>> *AGI* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> >>> <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/8630185-a57a74e1> | >>> Modify <https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;> Your Subscription >>> <http://www.listbox.com> >>> >> >> *AGI* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> >> <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/24379807-653794b5> | >> Modify >> <https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;> >> Your Subscription <http://www.listbox.com> >> > > > > ------------------------------------------- > AGI > Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now > RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/11943661-d9279dae > Modify Your Subscription: > https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; > Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com > ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
