Who is Marvin Minsky?
Marvin Minsky, born in 1927, has been one of the biggest names in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) for the last half of the 20th century and into the early years of the 21st century. He is considered one of the field’s foremost pioneers, and has worked in it since before it was even formally conceived in 1956. He continues to be intellectually active to this day, publishing a book titled The Emotion Machine in November 2006, and appearing at conferences from time to time. In 1951 Marvin Minsky invented SNARC, the first artificial neural network (ANN), which gave birth to a whole field of AI. Along with Seymour Papert, he created programs using Logo, one of the earliest programming languages. With Papert he wrote the book Perceptrons, foundational in the field of artificial neural nets. The neural net idea was unique in that it did not require programmers to specify every line of code, but could be “grown” and trained in an organic way. In 1961 Marvin Minsky invented the cofoca
