Quotes by Marvin Minsky - Page 2

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 / Scientist
Technology
Able
Years
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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 / Scientist
Action
Planning
Reasoning
Robots
Solve
Vision
Explored
Forth
Robot
Structural
Winston
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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 / Scientist
Believe
Simple
Thinking
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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 / Scientist
Silly
Universe
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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 / Scientist
Pops
Scene
Surprise
Alien
Chest
Creature
Occurred
Same Thing
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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 / Scientist
Common Sense
Ideas
Simple
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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 / Scientist
Doors
Eye
Mistake
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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 / Scientist
Art
Music
Details
People
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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 / Scientist
Car
Differences
Example
Left
Single
Rules
All The Difference
Difference
Drives
For Example
Individuals
Makes
Societies
No Difference
Right
Sense
Whether
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I suspect that pleasure is mainly used to turn off parts of the brain so you can keep fresh the memories of things you're trying to learn. It protects the short-term memory buffers. That's one theory of pleasure.
Marvin Minsky / Scientist
Brain
Memories
Pleasure
Short Term
Theory
Mainly
Parts
Protects
Suspect
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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 / Scientist
Computer
Excitement
Mit
Moved
Representation
Vision
David
Systems
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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 / Scientist
Buried
Feet
Heavy
Rotating
Standing
Base
Ground
Wrench
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The degree of intelligence that a man or a machine can show depends on many qualities of the ways that knowledge, goals, and problem-solving techniques are represented and put together, and not so much on the fine details.
Marvin Minsky / Scientist
Problem Solving
Qualities
Techniques
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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 / Scientist
Heard
Impressed
Mit
Stanley
Stuff
Work Good Find
Came
Graphics
Lab
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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 / Scientist
Program
Solutions
Aspects
Basic
Database
Finding
Similar
Stored
Tries
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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 / Scientist
Dinosaurs
Jurassic Park
Light
Magic
Race
Helped
Industrial
Jurassic
Park
Screen
Techniques
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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 / Scientist
Science
Astrology
Discovery
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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 / Scientist
Mean
Real
Secret
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We humans are not the end of evolution, so if we can make a machine that's as smart as a person, we can probably also make one that's much smarter. There's no point in making just another person. You want to make one that can do things we can't.
Marvin Minsky / Scientist
Evolution
No Point
Smarter
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I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one's nature.
Marvin Minsky / Scientist
Nature Believe I Believe
Construct
Formed
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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 / Scientist
Solve
Ahead
Network
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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 / Scientist
Childhood
Ideas
Years
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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 / Scientist
Arithmetic
Calculus
Domain
Integration
Simple
Smart
Solve
Technique
Tricky
Perform
Fraction
Unlike
Partial
Parts
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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 / Scientist
Next
Psychology
Roles
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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 / Scientist
Children
Ideas
Smart
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A couple of hundred years from now, maybe [science fiction writers] Isaac Asimov and Fred Pohl will be considered the important philosophers of the twentieth century, and the professional philosophers will almost all be forgotten, because they're just shallow and wrong, and their ideas aren't very powerful.
Marvin Minsky / Scientist
Couple
Powerful
Years
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It's degrading or insulting to say somebody is a good person or has a soul. Each person has built this incredibly complex structure, and if you attribute it to a magical pearl in the middle of an oyster that makes you good, that's trivializing a person and keeps you from thinking of what's really happening.
Marvin Minsky / Scientist
Degrading
Good Person
Insulting
Middle
Structure
Attribute
Complex
Happening
Incredibly
Magical
Oyster
Pearl
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I think every person either inherits or eventually makes up their own idea of what they are and who they are and what caused the world to be, and it seems to me that these stories of creation myth, adopted by different cultures - most of them are less insightful than the stories made up by individual poets and writers.
Marvin Minsky / Scientist
Adopted
Creation
Different Cultures
Insightful
Myth
Caused
World Me Person
Cultures
Poets
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Each practitioner thinks there's one magic way to get a machine to be smart, and so they're all wasting their time in a sense. On the other hand, each of them is improving some particular method, so maybe someday in the near future, or maybe it's two generations away, someone else will come around and say, "Let's put all these together," and then it will be smart.
Marvin Minsky / Scientist
Hands
Smart
Thinking
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If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that's what we mean by thinking!
Marvin Minsky / Scientist
Motivational
Mean
Thinking
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A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying ﬁrst a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t ﬂexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.
Marvin Minsky / Scientist
Sound
Trying
Typewriters
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It makes no sense to seek a single best way to represent knowledge-because each particular form of expression also brings its particular limitations. For example, logic-based systems are very precise, but they make it hard to do reasoning with analogies. Similarly, statistical systems are useful for making predictions, but do not serve well to represent the reasons why those predictions are sometimes correct.
Marvin Minsky / Scientist
Journey
Knowledge
Analogies
Example
Expression
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What is intelligence, anyway It is only a word that people use to name those unknown processes with which our brains solve problems we call hard. But whenever you learn a skill yourself, you're less impressed or mystified when other people do the same. This is why the meaning of 'intelligence' seems so elusive: It describes not some definite thing but only the momentary horizon of our ignorance about how minds might work.
Marvin Minsky / Scientist
Ignorance
Names
Skills
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Each part of the mind sees only a little of what happens in some others, and that little is swiftly refined, reformulated and "represented." We like to believe that these fragments have meanings in themselves - apart from the great webs of structure from which they emerge - and indeed this illusion is valuable to us qua thinkers - but not to us as psychologists - because it leads us to think that expressible knowledge is the first thing to study.
Marvin Minsky / Scientist
Journey
Knowledge
Believe
Mind
Thinking
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How hard is it to build an intelligent machine? I don't think it's so hard, but that's my opinion, and I've written two books on how I think one should do it. The basic idea I promote is that you mustn't look for a magic bullet. You mustn't look for one wonderful way to solve all problems. Instead you want to look for 20 or 30 ways to solve different kinds of problems. And to build some kind of higher administrative device that figures out what kind of problem you have and what method to use.
Marvin Minsky / Scientist
Book
Intelligent
Thinking
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Marvin Minsky Quotes - Page 2

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