
Marvin Minsky's Homepage - jessup
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/
======
chestervonwinch
An interesting quote from his biography page next to his Perceptrons text:

> ... Many textbooks wrongly state that these limits apply only to networks
> with one or two layers, but it appears that those authors did not read or
> understand our book! For it is easy to show that virtually all our
> conclusions also apply to feedforward networks of any depth (with smaller,
> but still-exponential rates of coefficient-growth). Therefore, the popular
> rumor is wrong: that Back-Propagation remedies this, because no matter how
> fast such a machine can learn, it can't find solutions that don't exist.
> Another sign that technical standards in that field are too weak: I've seen
> no publications at all that report any patterns that porder- or diameter-
> limited networks fail to learn, although such counterexamples are easy to
> make!

------
jordigh
Is Old Man Minsky the only one who still thinks that machines should do AI
instead of machine learning? He certainly seemed to believe that in 2007. Who
is still on his side?

[http://snarkmarket.com/blog/snarkives/societyculture/old_man...](http://snarkmarket.com/blog/snarkives/societyculture/old_man_minsky/)

~~~
sp332
Machine-learning is a kind of AI, right? Assuming you mean human-style general
intelligence, it's more interesting to me since it helps us understand
ourselves, and we have a working model to work from.

~~~
jordigh
No, ML is basically stats when you have lots of computing power. Classical AI
tackled very different kinds of problems. There used to be a "war" of ideas
between connectionists (which kind of turned into ML when neural networks no
longer tried to be remotely biological) and computationalists, which is where
Minsky would probably be closer to. He wants us to understand how minds work
in order to model them better.

With ML you don't really try to understand. You throw a dumb and simple-minded
algorithm at lots of data and get back good results. You don't try to model
all of the complexities of an intelligent problem.

So, no, I would not say ML is a kind of AI.

------
westoncb
Anyone have opinions on his "The Emotion Machine"? I'd read "The Society of
Mind" as a teenager and it was hugely influential on me—but I read a few pages
of Emotion Machine last year, it felt very different, and I ended up not
continuing.

~~~
wittedhaddock
It was designed to be more continuous, and flowy. I believe Marvin, during one
lecture, mentioned that a younger audience preferred it.

I don't compare the two. They are different presentations of an idea. I find
reading them to be a great way to think deeper, and ask better questions
about, the ideas abstracted.

Whenever I read TSoM and EM, I always feel like I missed so much -- this
feeling seems to only increase read after read.

------
kleer001
Why would you put your relative's homepages and email addresses on your
homepage? It strikes me as strange, but I'm sure there's a sensible reason.

~~~
segmondy
You wouldn't understand because you didn't experience the web when it was new
and friendly. Before we littered it with cat pictures, we had links to family
and friends pages. We had our email on it too before the spam wars.

~~~
rdtsc
Exactly. Also there was no facebook, twitter, type services. If someone got an
account some place to create a website (like say a university professor), that
was rather special and they would also use it to host their family's pictures,
maybe have a section for his wife's cake decorating hobby and so on.

~~~
agumonkey
I think it was even before Facebook, remember how everything was completely
public at first (and by first I meant when it was already launched globally,
just before it became a hype). I remember being utterly surprised seeing all
girls (I know) phone numbers out in the clear. So I guess we were already not
naive anymore about the web.

------
rectangletangle
The minimalist HTML style reminds me of Stallman's site

[https://stallman.org/](https://stallman.org/)

~~~
vortico
Pretty much everyone in academia does this, because they know how to make
functional, timeless websites that are compatible with all devices and
browsers in the present, past, and future, all while maintaining their busy
schedule. (Or perhaps they just don't know beyond basic HTML.)

------
MichaelMoser123
The videos of Minsky's lectures on Society of Mind are on youtube

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pb3z2w9gDg&list=PLUl4u3cNGP...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pb3z2w9gDg&list=PLUl4u3cNGP61E-vNcDV0w5xpsIBYNJDkU)

------
adamzerner
Not to complain, but I find it surprising that the web pages for such
prominent academics/people are often so ugly. Why not pay some web designer to
spruce it up? Or maybe have the department/school use a nice template? Seems
worth it to me.

~~~
Rangi42
This already _is_ a nice template. Plain text that responds well to zooming by
the user; default colors that are easy to read and make links obvious; a few
important images that are large enough to see, but don't take up half the
screen like some sites' banners. If you prefer white-on-black text and have a
user stylesheet for it (which I do), the site responds well to that too,
without any nested <div>s or background-image:s complicating things (unlike
some). I don't think that HTML5 web fonts or a whitespace-heavy designer
template would aid in conveying any of the brief and well-organized
information on the page.

See also:
[http://justinjackson.ca/words.html](http://justinjackson.ca/words.html) and
[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com).

(The only thing I would add to either of those is this bit of CSS: body{max-
width:900px;margin:0 auto;} to make it easier to read on wide screens.)

~~~
agumonkey
Similarly Oleg Kiselyov repository of wonders:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20080303222623/http://okmij.org/f...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080303222623/http://okmij.org/ftp/)

He added a ~sidebar~ since, now it's all ugly. /s

