Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky is an American cognitive scientist and leader in the field of artificial intelligence. He has also made significant contributions in cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, robotics and optics. Since 1958 he has been on faculty at MIT, where he co-founded the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Minsky earned his PhD in mathematics from Princeton and in 1951 he built SNARC, the first neural network simulator, in order to investigate and demonstrate how machines learn. His conceptions of human intellectual function and structure are laid out in several of his published books. The Society of Mind presents his theory that intelligence is a product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. The Emotion Machine offers critiques of some common theories of how minds work, as well as Minsky’s own hypotheses on the nature of human intelligence.

Minsky’s later work has been dedicated to developing in machines the human capacity for commonsense reasoning.