Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky was an American cognitive scientist and one of the founding figures of the field of artificial intelligence. He co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with John McCarthy in 1959 and spent much of his career studying how intelligence, whether biological or artificial, might be understood as arising from the interaction of many simple processes. With Seymour Papert, Minsky co-authored the 1969 book Perceptrons, a mathematical analysis of a simple type of neural network whose limitations, once demonstrated rigorously, contributed to a widely discussed slowdown in neural network research that lasted for years afterward. He later developed the frame theory of knowledge representation and, in his 1986 book The Society of Mind, argued that the mind emerges from the cooperation of many smaller, individually mindless processes called agents. Minsky received the Turing Award in 1969 for his central role in creating the field of artificial intelligence.