[im] fwd: Marvin Minsky, Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88

[János Sugár]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/business/marvin-minsky-pioneer-in-artificial-intelligence-dies-at-88.html?_r=0

Professor Minsky's book _The Society of Mind_ a seminal work
published in 1985, proposed "that intelligence is not the product of any
singular mechanism but comes from the managed interaction of a diverse
variety of resourceful agents" as he wrote on his website.

Underlying that hypothesis was his and Professor Papert's belief that
there is no real difference between humans and machines. Humans, they
maintained, are actually machines of a kind whose brains are made up of many
semiautonomous but unintelligent "agents". And different tasks, they
said, "require fundamentally different mechanisms."

Their theory revolutionized thinking about how the brain works and how
people learn.

Professor Minsky's courses at M.I.T.  - he insisted on holding them in
the evenings - became a magnet for several generations of graduate
students, many of whom went on to become computer science superstars
themselves.