{"id":2639,"date":"2016-01-26T10:13:56","date_gmt":"2016-01-26T15:13:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2639"},"modified":"2017-01-12T20:39:42","modified_gmt":"2017-01-13T01:39:42","slug":"marvin-minsky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2639","title":{"rendered":"Marvin Minsky"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday brought the sad news that Marvin Minsky <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/01\/26\/business\/marvin-minsky-pioneer-in-artificial-intelligence-dies-at-88.html?_r=1\">passed away<\/a> at age 88. \u00a0I never met Minsky (I wish I had); I just had one email exchange with him back in 2002, about Stephen Wolfram&#8217;s book. \u00a0But Minsky was my academic great-grandfather (through Manuel Blum and Umesh Vazirani), and he influenced me in many other ways. \u00a0For example, in his and Papert&#8217;s 1968\u00a0book <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Perceptrons-Introduction-Computational-Geometry-Expanded\/dp\/0262631113\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1453820599&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=perceptrons\">Perceptrons<\/a>&#8212;notorious for &#8220;killing neural net research for a decade,&#8221; because of its mis- or over-interpreted theorems about the representational limitations of single-layer neural nets&#8212;the way Minsky and Papert <em>proved<\/em> those theorems was by translating questions about computation into questions about the existence or nonexistence of low-degree polynomials with various properties, and then answering the latter questions using <strong>MATH<\/strong>. \u00a0Their &#8220;polynomial method&#8221; is now a mainstay of quantum algorithms\u00a0research (having been brought to the subject by <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/quant-ph\/9802049\">Beals et al.<\/a>), and in particular, has been a mainstay of my own career. \u00a0Hardly Minsky&#8217;s best-known contribution to human knowledge, but that even such a relatively minor part\u00a0of his oeuvre could have legs half a century later\u00a0is a testament to his impact.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sure readers will have other thoughts to share about Minsky, so please do so in the comments section. \u00a0Personal reminiscences are especially welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday brought the sad news that Marvin Minsky passed away at age 88. \u00a0I never met Minsky (I wish I had); I just had one email exchange with him back in 2002, about Stephen Wolfram&#8217;s book. \u00a0But Minsky was my academic great-grandfather (through Manuel Blum and Umesh Vazirani), and he influenced me in many other [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[31,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-nerd-interest"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2639"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2642,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2639\/revisions\/2642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}