Marvin Minsky

1927–2016 · American cognitive scientist

Topics: learning, artificial intelligence, complexity, software design

• Most adults have some childlike fascination for making and arranging larger structures out of smaller ones.

  — Marvin Minsky

• We do not see that any good can come of experiments which pay no attention to limiting factors that will assert themselves as soon as the small model is scaled up to a usable size.

  — Marvin Minsky

• When no idea seems right, the right one must seem wrong.

  — Marvin Minsky

• Old answers never perfectly suit new questions, except in the most formal, logical circumstances.

  — Marvin Minsky

• Just knowing that such states exist, that is, having symbols for them, is half the battle.

  — Marvin Minsky

• If there's something you like very much then you should regard this not as you feeling good but as a kind of brain cancer, because it means that some small part of your mind has figured out how to turn off all the other things.

  — Marvin Minsky

• Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that – where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.

  — Marvin Minsky

• 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

• Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.

  — Marvin Minsky

• Every system that we build will surprise us with new kinds of flaws until those machines become clever enough to conceal their faults from us.

  — Marvin Minsky

• 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

• If explaining minds seems harder than explaining songs, we should remember that sometimes enlarging problems makes them simpler!

  — Marvin Minsky

• We'll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.

  — Marvin Minsky

• No single-method learning scheme can operate efficiently for every possible task; we cannot expect any one type of machine to account for any large portion of human psychology.

  — Marvin Minsky

• Looking back in vision is like recapitulation in music; both give us time, at certain points, to reconfirm or change our conceptions of the whole.

  — Marvin Minsky

• Unless we can explain the mind in terms of things that have no thoughts or feelings of their own, we'll only have gone around in a circle.

  — Marvin Minsky

• I am inclined to doubt that anything very resembling formal logic could be a good model for human reasoning.

  — Marvin Minsky

• For generations, scientists and philosophers have tried to explain ordinary reasoning in terms of logical principles — with virtually no success.

  — Marvin Minsky

• We learn to see gases and fluids as particles, particles as waves, and waves as envelopes of growing spheres.

  — Marvin Minsky

• Our eyes are always flashing sudden flicks of different pictures to our brains, yet none of that saccadic action leads to any sense of change or motion in the world; each thing reposes calmly in its "place"! ...What makes us such innate Copernicans?

  — Marvin Minsky