117 Quotes by Marvin Minsky

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.

I think Lenat is headed in the right direction, but someone needs to include a knowledge base about learning.

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!

There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.

For the real systems, you never knew if it worked or if it didn't work because a cloud went over the window and changed the lighting.

Well, we were trying to make intelligent machines. There were lots of good students working on interesting and important problems.

A major problem with AI research then was that Ph.D. dissertations were huge programs, and only the writer knew how they worked.

The nature of mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect. ...it's only what we must expect from evolution's countless tricks.

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.