Marvin Minsky Quotes

Only the surface of reason is rational. I don't mean that understanding emotion is easy, only that understanding reason is probably harder.

All intelligent persons also possess some larger-scale frame-systems whose members seemed at first impossibly different — like water with electricity, or poetry with music. Yet many such analogies — along with the knowledge of how to apply them — are among our most powerful tools of thought. They explain our ability sometimes to see one thing — or idea — as though it were another, and thus to apply knowledge and experience gathered in one domain to solve problems in another. It is thus that we transfer knowledge via the paradigms of Science. We learn to see gases and fluids as particles, particles as waves, and waves as envelopes of growing spheres.

It would seem that Perceptrons has much the same role as The Necronomicon -- that is, often cited but never read.

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."

We shall envision the mind (or brain) as composed of many partially autonomous "agents"—as a "Society" of smaller minds. ...It is easiest to think about partial states that constrain only agents within a single Division. ...(we suggest) the local mechanisms for resolving conflicts could be the precursors of what we know later as reasoning — useful ways to combine different fragments of knowledge.

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.

Changing the states of many agents grossly alters behavior, while changing only a few just perturbs the overall disposition a little.

When you "get an idea," or "solve a problem," or have a "memorable experience," you create what we shall call a K-line. This K-line gets connected to those "mental agencies" that were actively involved in the memorable event. When that K-line is later "activated," it reactivates some of those mental agencies, creating a "partial mental state" resembling the original.

I had the naive idea that if one could build a big enough network, with enough memory loops, it might get lucky and acquire the ability to envision things in its head. This became a field of study later. It was called self-organizing random networks. Even today, I still get letters from young students who say, 'Why are you people trying to program intelligence? Why don't you try to find a way to build a nervous system that will just spontaneously create it?' Finally, I decided that either this was a bad idea or it would take thousands or millions of neurons to make it work, and I couldn't afford to try to build a machine like that.

Have you considered perceptrons with many layers? ... We have not found (by thinking or by studying the literature) any other really interesting class of multilayered machine, at least none whose principles seem to have a significant relation to those of the perceptron. To see the force of this qualification it is worth pondering the fact, trivial in itself, that a universal computer could be built entirely out of linear threshold modules. This does not in any sense reduce the theory of computation and programming to the theory of per­ceptrons.