David Marr

1945–1980 · British neuroscientist and psychologist

Topics: artificial intelligence

• In order to understand bird flight, we have to understand aerodynamics; only then does the structure of feathers and the different shapes of bird's wings make sense.

  — David Marr

• The primitives of a representation are the most elementary units of shape information available in a representation.

  — David Marr

• Vision is a process that produces from images of the external world a description that is useful to the viewer and not cluttered with irrelevant information.

  — David Marr

• The critical act in formulating computational theories turns out to be the discovery of valid constraints on the way the world is structured -- constraints that provide sufficient information to allow the processing to succeed.

  — David Marr