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Marvin Minsky, one of the brightest minds in science has sadly passed away on Sunday.
Marvin Minsky died at the age of 88. The famous cognitive scientist died on Sunday and the news of his death came from the MIT Media Lab founder, Nicholas Negroponte. Negroponte has praised Minsky and said that he was one of the best in the science domain. He also said that Minsky brought deep thinking, humor and a different perspective to the Media Lab.
In 1951, Minsky developed the first neural network simulator, called SNARC. In 1956, he participated in a Dartmouth symposium that lasted two months, which is considered to be the event that founded the concept of artificial intelligence. After the symposium, Minsky wrote books that helped the scientist better understand the challenging that occur when machine intelligence is trying to be developed. These books include The Emotion Machine, Perceptrons and The Society of Mind.
Some of his most famous inventions include robotic devices, mechanical arms and hands, the Confocal Scanning Microscope and the musical variations synthetizer called the Muse. He was a member of NAE and Argentine NAS. He received a lot of awards for his extraordinary work, which include the Rank Prize, the ACM Turing Award, the Benjamin Franklin Medal and the IJCAI Research Excellence Award.
Marvin married his wife Gloria, a psychologist, in 1952 and their home became a repository full of valuable icons and artifacts. According to some experts, the house should be considered a national historic site. Some of the most interesting objects found in their home are a vintage robot, a bongo that Richard Feynman played when he visited, a vintage jukebox and a trapeze.
During an interview given to the Post last year, Gloria said that during one of her first conversations with Marvin, he said that he wanted to study the way in which the brain works. When he revealed that to her, she thought that he was either very wise, either very dumb but the years demonstrated that he was indeed extremely smart. The couple had very famous friends like Stanley Kubrick, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. Minsky also had conversations with John von Neumann and Albert Einstein.
Marvin Minsky died at the age of 88 due to a brain hemorrhage and the world lost one of the brightest scientists there ever was. All of his life he dedicated to research in the artificial intelligence field.
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