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Marvin Minsky's Homepage

by jessup on 8/16/15, 8:09 PM with 51 comments

  • by chestervonwinch on 8/17/15, 2:29 AM

    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!

  • by jordigh on 8/16/15, 8:48 PM

    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...

  • by westoncb on 8/16/15, 8:49 PM

    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.

  • by kleer001 on 8/16/15, 11:21 PM

    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.

  • by rectangletangle on 8/17/15, 4:01 AM

    The minimalist HTML style reminds me of Stallman's site

    https://stallman.org/

  • by MichaelMoser123 on 8/17/15, 4:32 AM

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

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pb3z2w9gDg&list=PLUl4u3cNGP...

  • by adamzerner on 8/17/15, 3:12 AM

    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.