Published on Edge.org (https://www.edge.org)

Remembering Minsky

MARVIN MINSKY 1927-2016

Minsky's First Law
Words should be your servants, not your masters.
Minsky's Second Law
Don't just do something. Stand there
(From “What’s Your Law?” 2004)

"To say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there's something wrong with questions like, "What caused the Universe to exist?"

Marvin Minsky, Stephen Jay Gould, Nicholas Humphrey, John Brockman,
Daniel C. Dennett @ Eastover Farm, August 1998: The birth of The Third Culture

THE REALITY CLUB: George Dyson, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Neil Gershenfeld, Daniel C. Dennett, Kevin Kelly, Jaron Lanier, Lee Smolin, Michael Hawley, Roger Schank, Brian Greene, Nicholas Negroponte, Pattie Maes, Gary Marcus, Sherry Turkle, Tod Machover, W. Daniel Hillis, Ed Boyden, Ken Forbus

From INTRODUCTION TO PART II: "A COLLECTION OF KLUDGES"
in THE THIRD CULTURE: BEYOND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
By John Brockman [5.1.96]

Introduction

One of the central metaphors of the third culture is computation. The computer does computation and the mind does computation. To understand what makes birds fly, you may look at airplanes, because there are principles of flight and aerodynamics that apply to anything that flies. That is how the idea of computation figures into the new ways in which scientists are thinking about complicated systems.

At first, people who wanted to be scientific about the mind tried to treat it by looking for fundamentals, as in physics. We had waves of so-called mathematical psychology, and before that psychologists were trying to find a simple building block — an "atom" — with which to reconstruct the mind. That approach did not work. It turns out that minds, which are brains, are extremely complicated artifacts of natural selection, and as such they have many emergent properties that can best be understood from an engineering point of view.

We are also discovering that the world itself is very "kludgey"; it is made up of curious Rube Goldberg mechanisms that do cute tricks. This does not sit well with those who want science to be crystalline and precise, like Newton's pure mathematics. The idea that nature might be composed of Rube Goldberg machines is deeply offensive to people who have a strong esthetic drive — those who say that science must be beautiful, that it must be pure, that everything should be symmetrical and deducible from first principles. That esthetic has been a great motivating force in science, since Plato.

Counteracting it is the esthetic that emerges from this book — the esthetic that says the beauties of nature come from the interaction of mind-boggling complexities, and that it is complexity essentially most of the way down. The computational perspective — machines made out of machines made out of machines — is on the ascendant. There is a lot of talk about machines in this book.

Marvin Minsky is the leading light of AI — that is, artificial intelligence. He sees the brain as a myriad of structures. Scientists who, like Minsky, take the strong AI view believe that a computer model of the brain will be able to explain what we know of the brain's cognitive abilities. Minsky identifies consciousness with high-level, abstract thought, and believes that in principle machines can do everything a conscious human being can do.

"SMART MACHINES' — Marvin Minsky
Chapter 8 in THE THIRD CULTURE
By John Brockman [5.1.96]

Roger Schank: Marvin Minsky is the smartest person I've ever known. He's absolutely full of ideas, and he hasn't gotten one step slower or one step dumber. One of the things about Marvin that's really fantastic is that he never got too old. He's wonderfully childlike. I think that's a major factor explaining why he's such a good thinker. There are aspects of him I'd like to pattern myself after. Because what happens to some scientists is that they get full of their power and importance, and they lose track of how to think brilliant thoughts. That's never happened to Marvin.

Like everyone else, I think most of the time. But mostly I think about thinking. How do people recognize things? How do we make our decisions? How do we get our new ideas? How do we learn from experience? Of course, I don't think only about psychology. I like solving problems in other fields — engineering, mathematics, physics, and biology. But whenever a problem seems too hard, I start wondering why that problem seems so hard, and we're back again to psychology! Of course, we all use familiar self-help techniques, such as asking, "Am I representing the problem in an unsuitable way?" or "Am I trying to use an unsuitable method?" However, another way is to ask, "How would I make a machine to solve that kind of problem?"

A century ago, there would have been no way even to start thinking about making smart machines. Today, though, there are lots of good ideas about this. The trouble is, almost no one has thought enough about how to put all those ideas together. That's what I think about most of the time.

The technical field of research toward machine intelligence really started with the emergence in the 1940s of what was first called cybernetics. Soon this became a main concern of several different scientific fields, including computer science, neuropsychology, computational linguistics, control theory, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence — and, more recently, the new fields called connectionism, virtual reality, intelligent agents, and artificial life.

Why are so many people now concerned with making machines that think and learn? It's clear that this is useful to do, because we already have so many machines that solve so many important and interesting problems. But I think we're motivated also by a negative reason: the sense that our traditional concepts about psychology are no longer serving us well enough. Psychology developed rapidly in the early years of this century, and produced many good theories about the periphery of psychology — notably, about certain aspects of perception, learning, and language. But experimental psychology never told us enough about issues of more central concern — about thinking, meaning, consciousness, or feeling. ... [Continue]

CONSCIOUSNESS IS A BIG SUITCASE
A Talk with Marvin Minsky [9.26.98]

Marvin Minsky, Alan Guth, Daniel C. Dennett, Rodney Brooks, Nicholas Humphrey, Lee Smolin

My goal is making machines that can think—by understanding how people think. One reason why we find this hard to do is because our old ideas about psychology are mostly wrong. Most words we use to describe our minds (like "consciousness", "learning", or "memory") are suitcase-like jumbles of different ideas. Those old ideas were formed long ago, before 'computer science' appeared. It was not until the 1950s that we began to develop better ways to help think about complex processes.

Computer science is not really about computers at all, but about ways to describe processes. As soon as those computers appeared, this became an urgent need. Soon after that we recognized that this was also what we'd need to describe the processes that might be involved in human thinking, reasoning, memory, and pattern recognition, etc.

JB: You say 1950, but wouldn't this be preceded by the ideas floating around the Macy Conferences in the '40s?

MM: Yes, indeed. Those new ideas were already starting to grow before computers created a more urgent need. Before programming languages, mathematicians such as Emil Post, Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing already had many related ideas. In the 1940s these ideas began to spread, and the Macy Conference publications were the first to reach more of the technical public. In the same period, there were similar movements in psychology, as Sigmund Freud, Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and Jean Piaget also tried to imagine advanced architectures for 'mental computation.' In the same period, in neurology, there were my own early mentors-Nicholas Rashevsky, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, Norbert Wiener, and their followers-and all those new ideas began to coalesce under the name 'cybernetics.' Unfortunately, that new domain was mainly dominated by continuous mathematics and feedback theory. This made cybernetics slow to evolve more symbolic computational viewpoints, and the new field of Artificial Intelligence headed off to develop distinctly different kinds of psychological models.

JB: Gregory Bateson once said to me that the cybernetic idea was the most important idea since Jesus Christ.

MM: Well, surely it was extremely important in an evolutionary way. Cybernetics developed many ideas that were powerful enough to challenge the religious and vitalistic traditions that had for so long protected us from changing how we viewed ourselves. These changes were so radical as to undermine cybernetics itself. So much so that the next generation of computational pioneers-the ones who aimed more purposefully toward Artificial Intelligence-set much of cybernetics aside.

Let's get back to those suitcase-words (like intuition or consciousness) that all of us use to encapsulate our jumbled ideas about our minds. We use those words as suitcases in which to contain all sorts of mysteries that we can't yet explain. This in turn leads us to regard these as though they were "things" with no structures to analyze. I think this is what leads so many of us to the dogma of dualism-the idea that 'subjective' matters lie in a realm that experimental science can never reach. Many philosophers, even today, hold the strange idea that there could be a machine that works and behaves just like a brain, yet does not experience consciousness. If that were the case, then this would imply that subjective feelings do not result from the processes that occur inside brains. Therefore (so the argument goes) a feeling must be a nonphysical thing that has no causes or consequences. Surely, no such thing could ever be explained! ...[Continue]

THE EMOTION UNIVERSE
A Talk with Marvin Minsky [9.16.02]

Ray Kurzweil, Seth Lloyd, Alan Guth, Paul Steinhardt, Marvin Minsky

To say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there's something wrong with questions like, "What caused the Universe to exist?

I was listening to this group talking about universes, and it seems to me there's one possibility that's so simple that people don't discuss it. Certainly a question that occurs in all religions is, "Who created the universe, and why? And what's it for?" But something is wrong with such questions because they make extra hypotheses that don't make sense. When you say that X exists, you're saying that X is in the Universe. It's all right to say, "this glass of water exists" because that's the same as "This glass is in the Universe." But to say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there's something wrong with questions like, "What caused the Universe to exist?"

The only way I can see to make sense of this is to adopt the famous "many-worlds theory" which says that there are many "possible universes" and that there is nothing distinguished or unique about the one that we are in - except that it is the one we are in. In other words, there's no need to think that our world 'exists'; instead, think of it as like a computer game, and consider the following sequence of 'Theories of It":

(1) Imagine that somewhere there is a computer that simulates a certain World, in which some simulated people evolve. Eventually, when these become smart, one of those persons asks the others, "What caused this particular World to exist, and why are we in it?" But of course that World doesn't 'really exist' because it is only a simulation.

(2) Then it might occur to one of those people that, perhaps, they are part of a simulation. Then that person might go on to ask, "Who wrote the Program that simulates us, and who made the Computer that runs that Program?"

(3) But then someone else could argue that, "Perhaps there is no Computer at all. Only the Program needs to exist - because once that Program is written, then this will determine everything that will happen in that simulation. After all, once the computer and program have been described (along with some set of initial conditions) this will explain the entire World, including all its inhabitants, and everything that will happen to them. So the only real question is what is that program and who wrote it, and why"

(4) Finally another one of those 'people' observes, "No one needs to write it at all! It is just one of 'all possible computations!' No one has to write it down. No one even has to think of it! So long as it is 'possible in principle,' then people in that Universe will think and believe that they exist!'

So we have to conclude that it doesn't make sense to ask about why this world exists. However, there still remain other good questions to ask, about how this particular Universe works. For example, we know a lot about ourselves - in particular, about how we evolved - and we can see that, for this to occur, the 'program' that produced us must have certain kinds of properties. For example, there cannot be structures that evolve (that is, in the Darwinian way) unless there can be some structures that can make mutated copies of themselves; this means that some things must be stable enough to have some persistent properties. Something like molecules that last long enough, etc. ...[Continue]

A Conversation: THE NEW HUMANISTS:
Daniel C. Dennett, Marvin Minsky, and John Brockman
[9.18.03]

Part 1

Part 2

NEW PROSPECTS OF IMMORTALITY
by Marvin Minsky
From: "What Are You Optimistic About?", 2007

Benjamin Franklin: I wish it were possible... to invent a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner that they might be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to an ordinary death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! But... in all probability, we live in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy of science, to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection.
—Letter to Jacques Dubourg, April 1773

Eternal life may come within our reach once we understand enough about how our knowledge and mental processes are embodied in our brains. For then we should be able to duplicate that information — and then into more robust machinery. This might be possible late in this century, in view of how much we are learning about how human brains work — and the growth of computer capacities.

However, this could have been possible long ago if the progress of science had not succumbed to the spread of monotheistic religions. For as early as 250 BCE, Archimedes was well on the way toward modern physics and calculus. So in an alternate version of history (in which the pursuit of science did not decline) just a few more centuries could have allowed the likes of Newton, Maxwell, Gauss, and Pasteur to anticipate our present state of knowledge about physics, mathematics, and biology. Then perhaps by 300 AD we could have learned so much about the mechanics of minds that citizens could decide on the lengths of their lives.

I'm sure that not all scholars would agree that religion retarded the progress of science. However, the above scenario seems to suggest that Pascal was wrong when he concluded that only faith could offer salvation. For if science had not lost those millennia, we might be already be able to transfer our minds into our machines. If so, then you could rightly complain that religions have deprived you of the option of having an afterlife!

Do we really want to lengthen our lives?

Woody Allen: I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

In discussing this prospect with various groups, I was surprised to find that the idea of extending one's lifetime to thousands of years was often seen as a dismal suggestion. The response to my several informal polls included such objections as these: "Why would anyone want to live for a thousand hundred years? What if you outlived all your friends? What would you do with all that time? Wouldn't one's life become terribly boring?"

What can one conclude from this? Perhaps some of those persons lived with a sense that they did not deserve to live so long. Perhaps others did not regard themselves as having worthy long term goals. In any case, I find it worrisome that so many of our citizens are resigned to die. A planetful of people who feel that they do not have much to lose: surely this could be dangerous. (I neglected to ask the religious ones why perpetual heaven would be less boring.)

However, my scientist friends showed few such concerns: "There are countless things that I want to find out, and so many problems I want to solve, that I could use many centuries." I'll grant that religious beliefs can bring mental relief and emotional peace—but I question whether these, alone, should be seen as commendable long-term goals.

The quality of extended lives

Anatole France: The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.

Certainly, immortality would seem unattractive if it meant endless infirmity, debility, and dependency upon others—but here we'll assume a state of perfect health. A somewhat sounder concern might be that the old ones should die to make room for young ones with newer ideas. However, this leaves out the likelihood that are many important ideas that no human person could reach in, say, less than a few hundred well focused years. If so, then a limited lifespan might deprive us of great oceans of wisdom that no one can grasp.

In any case, such objections are shortsighted because, once we embody our minds in machines, we'll find ways to expand their capacities. You'll be able to edit your former mind, or merge it with parts of other minds — or develop completely new ways to think. Furthermore, our future technologies will no longer constrain us to think at the crawling pace of "real time." The events in our computers already proceed a millions times faster than those in our brain. To such beings, a minute might seem as long as a human year.

How could we download a human mind?

Today we are only beginning to understand the machinery of our human brains, but we already have many different theories about how those organs embody the processes that we call our minds. We often hear arguments about which of those different theories are right — but those often are the wrong questions to ask, because we know that every brain has hundreds of different specialized regions that work in different ways. I have suggested a dozen different ways in which our brains might represent our skill and memories. It could be many years before we know which structures and functions we'll need to reproduce.

(No such copies can yet be made today, so if you want immortality, your only present option is to have your brain preserved by a Cryonics company. However, improving this field still needs further research — but there is not enough funding for this today — although the same research is also needed for advancing the field of transplanting organs.)

Some writers have even suggested that, to make a working copy of a mind, one might have to include many small details about the connections among all the cells of a brain; if so, it would require an immense amount of machinery to simulate all those cells' chemistry. However, I suspect we'll need far less than that, because our nervous systems must have evolved to be insensitive to lower-level details; otherwise, our brains would rarely work.

Fortunately, we won't need to solve all those problems at once. For long before we are able to make complete "backups" of our personalities, this field of research will produce a great flood of ideas for adding new features and accessories to our existing brains. Then this may lead, through smaller steps, to replacing all parts of our bodies and brains — and thus repairing all the defects and flaws that make presently our lives so brief. And the more we learn about how our brains work, the more ways we will find to provide them with new abilities that never evolved in biology.

Remembering Minsky [1]

THE REALITY CLUB: George Dyson, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Neil Gershenfeld, Daniel C. Dennett, Kevin Kelly, Jaron Lanier, Lee Smolin, Michael Hawley, Roger Schank, Brian Greene, Nicholas Negroponte, Pattie Maes, Gary Marcus, Sherry Turkle, Tod Machover, W. Daniel Hillis, Ed Boyden, Ken Forbus

Reality Club Discussion

Ken Forbus

Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Education at Northwestern University

I first met Marvin Minsky the day after I arrived at MIT as an incoming freshman. This was no accident. I had read about artificial intelligence in high school, including a book with the classic picture of Marvin with a robot, and had decided that that was what I wanted to do. In 1973 computers were scarce, universities typically had at most a handful. Most university computer science programs did not have AI groups, since it was considered too far-out. My local university had a Federal Repository Library, so their collection of AI books was, for that time, complete. It occupied all of two rows on a single shelf. Today, two rows would not even suffice to handle just a year's publication output, if converted to paper. And artificial intelligence is now something that every university computer science program is expected to have. Minsky's vision of using computers to understand how minds work has been that influential.

I walked into Marvin's office-the door was open and no appointment was necessary. We talked for a while, and he sent me around to talk to people whom I might work with. I ended up working with the late David Marr, an English mathematician whom Marvin had invited to the MIT AI lab because of his thesis work on mathematical neural modeling. While connectionists today often view Marvin as an opponent, it is more accurate to say he wasn't a cheerleader, for that or any single approach. What was crucial to Marvin was not defending any particular method, but understanding how things worked and why. I worked with David through my time as an undergraduate, and then switched to Gerry Sussman, one of Marvin's alums, for my Ph.D. work. So Marvin and the vibrant environment he helped create at the MIT AI lab were for me, as for so many others, a major force in my intellectual development.

Marvin had strong ideas, and relished shaking people up when he thought their path was unproductive. For example, at a Biological Information Processing workshop at Cold Spring Harbor in the late 1970s, Marvin was the after-dinner speaker one night. The biologists who did neural work were focused on single-cell recordings. Marvin nearly caused a riot when he asserted that they were all wasting their time: "Until you can take a picture of cat's brain, say "orange juice" to it, and compare them, you won't really learn anything." The current dominance of imaging techniques in neuroscience shows just how prescient that argument was.

Marvin also had a sense of esthetics and craft, which he applied to computers as well as music. He was interested in hardware as well as software. For example, he built a Logo machine as a palate-cleansing project after finishing his Frames paper. At one point, when microprocessors were still very expensive, he began using a Z80 computer for writing. The Z80 was an 8 bit CPU, and operating systems for microprocessors at that time did not use virtual memory, so documents had to be extremely short. Given that the text editing software at the lab was much better, I asked him why he was doing that. He replied that this felt like a useful creative constraint. The ideas he was working out involved arguing that the mind was made up of many small pieces. So why not structure the book about this theory in the same way? This was, of course, what ultimately became the Society of Mind book.

With Marvin gone, none of the founders of AI remain with us. That should remind us about just how young this field is, and encourage us to follow in the footsteps of these visionary pioneers.

Farewell, Marvin.

Ed Boyden

Neuroscientist, MIT Media Lab; Leader, Synthetic Neurobiology Group, working on optogenetics and other tools

As a neuroengineer, some of my formative interactions were with Marvin Minsky. Around 1998, a few of us at the Media Lab—Ben Vigoda, Yael Maguire, and others—started a discussion group with bold ambitions—to design analog computers, to write a book on the physics of computation. But mostly we talked about big ideas. The session I remember most was, one night, we hosted a discussion between Marvin and Jerry Lettvin (the great MIT neurophysiologist). Marvin was the ultimate optimist, thinking we would solve the mind through contemplation. Jerry was an experimentalist, and despaired that we could barely comprehend how the eye of the frog could detect a bug. I decided that anything these two minds disagreed on was worth making a career out of—this discussion helped cement my transition out of physics and into neuroscience.

Many years later, as a professor at the MIT Media Lab, I was starting to explain some neuroscience experiments in a small group setting, and Marvin, ever the neuroscience skeptic, declared, "I really like Ed as a person, but do I have to listen to him?" The scrutiny from Marvin was always welcome, since one had to think about how you'd achieve the end goal: understanding the mind itself. Settling for less was not acceptable.

Later I bumped into Marvin, and clarified how our group was not doing neuroscience-as-usual—we were developing new technologies that might change the rules of the game, and help make neuroscience into a new enterprise, which might eventually lead to new kinds of AI someday. He simply smiled in his inscrutable way, in a way that seemed to me to be both deeply encouraging and skeptical. Thanks for all that you've contributed, Marvin, to the human enterprise—you will be missed.

W. Daniel Hillis

Physicist, Computer Scientist, Co-Founder, Applied Invention.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone

Marvin taught me to think. He was extraordinary in both in his imagination and in his intellectual generosity, and he was always inviting the people around him to see the world in an unconventional way. In the days since his death, reconnecting with so many of his friends and students, I have come to realize how deeply he succeeded. He touched us in way that both delighted us and made us smarter. Marvin awakened in us a power to think for ourselves.

Tod Machover

Composer; Professor of Music and Media, MIT Media Lab

Marvin loved music and it was a central part of his life. He grew up as a piano prodigy, but especially as a “thinker” about music. He understood music’s great pull on our emotions, and this made him curious, even suspicious. (He once asked me: “What right does Schumann have to order us around?”)

Why do we like music?

Why do we spend so much time listening to it?

Should we be feeling the music or thinking about it, or are these the same thing?

What actually goes on in our minds when we listen to a piece of music?

These sound like obvious questions, but you won’t find answers to them in any traditional book of music history or theory. Marvin is the only person I know who seriously asked these questions, and he spent much of his life trying to answer them.

What process did he use to do that? Marvin always said that the world was divided into two kinds of people, composers and improvisers. He was definitely an improviser. This showed in the very unconventional way he presented lectures and public discussions, never prepared in any conventional way, slides and transparencies seemingly placed in random and surprising order, but always brilliantly spontaneous and coherently profound.

And this was one of the great pleasures of being around Marvin. He lived to think, did much of that thinking out loud, and a lot of that thinking was around music. He’d sit at a piano—any piano, anywhere, always best if there were many other things going on in the same room—and improvise, talking while he played. He often started in the style of Bach or Beethoven, but branched out in ways that were purely Minsky-esque. Unlike anyone else I’ve ever known, Marvin was able to think and talk about his improvisations while playing. He’d say out loud:

Well, this chord could go here or here, why not there?

Boy, I’m stuck; maybe this inner melody needs to lead the way out.

Gee, there are a lot of different layers going on now; what would Bach have done.

And he’d do all of that without skipping a beat, literally.

Marvin improvised in similarly creative fashion when thinking about why music matters and what it means. Standing around the piano in our research area at the MIT Media Lab, Marvin would ask:

Does music use more different parts of our brain than any other activity?

Could one of the functions of music be to coordinate these different parts of the brain?

Do music’s harmony and counterpoint allow us to experiment with entertaining multiple thoughts at the same time?

Does music allow us to practice modulating our emotions on an intensified, compressed time scale?

Does music allow us to practice thinking itself—comparing, evaluating, following, deciding—while liberating us from the real world consequences of being wrong?

Is music in fact the best medium for showing us that emotion is just another form of thinking?

Being around Marvin meant being invited into this playful world of audacious exploration, sharing his ego-less passion to understand, witnessing his courage at realizing that with each answer there would only be more questions.

Marvin loved music, but he sure did take it seriously. And although he was the gentlest and kindest of men, certain things did make him angry. Wasting time without thinking was especially unforgivable. As he once said to me: “Thinking about the mind might sensitize people to how silly it is to spend a day thinking nothing at all”), and listening to insubstantial music was one of the paramount sins (except perhaps for sports, which he truly could not understand why anyone would play or watch).

Marvin looked for music that made him think, that connected with bigger ideas about life, and that opened up new horizons. He could find this by going back to Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, but also in John Cage and Frederic Rzewski.

Generally he did not find this in popular, commercial music, although there were exceptions such as The Beatles and U2. He got to know and admire Bono and The Edge and attended many of their concerts, always intrigued with how—as Bono had told him—the group carefully linked songs through common tempi and rhythmic units, to create continuity and to build tension over an entire live show.

One of my most powerful memories of Marvin is from a birthday party of mine that Marvin attended two years ago when his health was just starting to fail. It was one of those big birthdays, so our 18^th century wooden barn just outside of Boston was filled with friends and family, and there was much hubbub.

About halfway through the gathering, Marvin asked if he could play me something and I said of course; the whole group crammed into the smaller part of my barn, where my keyboard is located. Unlike his usual improvisations, which often took place in parallel with multiple other activities, this one silenced the room and kept us riveted for 20 minutes or so.

Marvin started out in a musical world that conjured Beethoven’s late piano sonatas, especially the slow, fugal movements, then built harmonically and motivically into something original, powerful, and surprising at every turn.

When Marvin finished, we all knew that we had heard something very special, full of joyful, inventive spontaneity but also—I suspect—having been carefully planned by Marvin ahead of time to produce the coherent, probing, moving result.Improvisation and composition, emotion and thinking, perfectly united. Beethoven could not have done it better.

Sherry Turkle

Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT; Internet Culture Researcher; Author, Reclaiming Conversation

I first met Marvin Minsky not as a participant in conversations with him but as an observer of the conversations he had with his longtime colleague and collaborator Seymour Papert. It was 1977. Seymour Papert and I had rented a bungalow on Plum Island. Marvin would visit, sometimes for a day, sometimes for two or three, sometimes for a few hours. It depended on how the conversation went. Marvin’s wife, the brilliant, wonderful, Gloria Rudisch, would sometimes come along.

Our bungalow had one large work room. A table was pushed up against a bank of windows that looked out to a porch that faced the sea. I’m allergic to the sun so during the work day I stayed inside, at that table. Seymour and Marvin usually worked by talking on the porch outside my window. I had a book deadline to meet, but when Marvin visited, I found it hard to not eavesdrop.

They were talking about an idea they called the “society of mind”—an idea for how the mind might do very smart things while being made up of agents that were quite dumb and had no idea what the mind as a whole was up to. It was the interaction of the agents that made the difference. Emergence: It was a way to think about mind as a machine that didn’t require the invention of a brilliant machine, only the collaboration of many simple-minded ones.

The idea was compelling. But equally compelling was how Marvin and Seymour worked.

Here is how I remember it: Marvin would declare an idea as though it were a fact.

But the tone was deceptive. The declaration was really an invitation to have the idea talked through. Otherwise put, it was ready for Seymour. So Seymour would start to talk and then Marvin would pick it up again.

After a while, Seymour would cook and everyone would eat. And then, the improved idea would come out again for more polishing. Finally, there came a moment, as though by the mutual decision of the two friends, when the carefully nurtured idea was up for deconstruction. Then, together, Seymour and Marvin would cart away the weak parts. Or discard the whole. Or salvage a small bit of writing for another bit of theory-making.

It was a way of working that struck me as exactly the opposite of the kind of collaboration I was most familiar with from graduate school. There, you tried out an idea on a colleague and the colleague’s role was to tear it down—the idea being that this criticism would lead you to make the idea better. I certainly learned a lot in graduate school, but that summer, listening to Marvin and Seymour nurture ideas in conversation, I know I learned how to think about thinking.

Gary Marcus

Professor of Psychology, Director NYU Center for Language and Music; Author, Guitar Zero

I knew Marvin only slightly, but always stood in awe of him; the work he did in inventing the confocal microscope, essentially a side project, is more than most of us could ever hope to do in a career. His early collaborator John McCarthy is the only other person I've met who could claim to have invented an entire field. Marvin was also, by far, the most curious adult I have ever met.

People in the field of neural networks (nowadays better known as deep learning) are almost never fair to Marvin. Most of them (at least over a certain age) are bitter about Marvin's 1969 book Perceptron (co-written with Seymour Papert). Minsky and Papert threw an unwarranted bucket of cold water on the incipient field of neural networks, widely viewed as slaying the field, prematurely.

But people always tell the story wrong. The usual story is that Marvin claimed that you could never learn anything interesting (aka nonlinear) from neural networks. What Minsky and Papert really showed is that you couldn't guarantee—prove—that neural networks with hidden layers would converge on a correct solution, rather than getting stuck in a local minimum. In 2016 their objection still holds—people's networks have gotten deeper and deeper, but Minsky's math is still correct. Just this morning I went to a talk where a deep learning guru acknowledged that (a) people in that field still don't really understand why their models work as they well as they do and (b) they still can't really guarantee much of anything if you test them in circumstances that differ from the circumstances on which they were trained. To many neural network people, Minsky represents the evil empire. But almost half a century later they still haven't fully faced up to his challenges.

Pattie Maes

Professor, MIT MediaLab; Program Head, MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences

As a person and a scientist, Marvin was always a true original, out-of-the-box thinker. While he is of course widely recognized as one of the founders of the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), his views were often at odds with the majority of the AI community.

For many decades, and even today, AI was plagued by what some of us refer to as "physics envy." Researchers sought a handful of universal principles or mechanisms that could explain and produce human-like intelligence. Marvin constantly reminded us that the real solution was likely to be a lot more complex. He described a myriad of different mechanisms that may be involved in producing intelligence in his books The Society of Mind and The Emotion Machine and emphasized the importance of giving computers large amounts of "common sense knowledge," a problem few AI researchers, even today, have attempted to tackle.

I suspect that gradually the field will come to align with his views, recognizing that his thoughts and writings have a timeless, deep quality.

Nicholas Negroponte

Architect; Founder & Chairman Emeritus, MIT's Media Lab; Founder, One Laptop per Child

Marvin talked in riddles that made perfect sense, were always profound and often so funny that you would find yourself laughing days later. His genius was so self-evident that it defined "awesome." The Media Lab bathed in his reflected light.

Brian Greene

Co-founder of the World Science Festival and Chairman, Science Festival Foundation; Professor of Mathematics & Physics, Columbia University; author, The Hidden Reality, The Fabric of the Cosmos, and The Elegant Universe

About 30 years ago when I was a young graduate student, John Cocke (an IBM fellow and influential voice in computer architecture) took me to meet Minksky at his home. We walked in and it was the first time I’d encountered a mind that was fascinated by, well, everything. Minsky’s passions and preoccupations were seemingly scattered high and low throughout the house—musical instruments here, gadgets there, demonstrations over here. Perhaps the decades have exaggerated my memory of the scene, and no doubt those who knew him far better than I could paint a more accurate picture, but I left the visit with a sense that I’d met someone rare and deep.

Roger Schank

CEO, Socratic Arts Inc.; John Evans Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Psychology and Education, Northwestern University; Author, Make School Meaningful-And Fun!

The first Cognitive Science Society conference was held in La Jolla in 1979. There were a dozen or so well known speakers. Marvin and I were two of them. When I spoke, Marvin was in the back of the large lecture hall. As soon as I was finished speaking, Marvin ran to the front and started patting me on the head. “It works!!” he said. Marvin behaved towards me as if I was his prodigy. People assumed I had been his student. In a sense I was. He had a combination of brilliance and child-like enthusiasm that I loved. I wanted to be him, but was not capable of it.

In 1986, the Mets played the Red Sox in the World Series. My son was 11. He was an avid Mets fan and he just had to go. I got tickets somehow and asked to stay with Marvin since he lived rather near Fenway Park. Marvin hated baseball. He made fun of my son, when we left for the game. “I see you are wearing an outfit!!” he exclaimed. (My son had on a Mets uniform.) When we came back from the game we discovered Marvin had watched the game on TV so he could discuss it with us. He was always present and giving in that way.

In the '90s Marvin was unhappy at MIT. He didn’t think he was being treated very well. I offered him a position at Northwestern. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t leave the life and people he loved in Boston.

When I knew I was going to see Marvin, I started thinking the way an athlete thinks before a big match. I was mentally preparing myself for combat. It was combat I relished, done with respect and brilliance and humor. I will miss that and I will miss him.

Michael Hawley

Musician, Scientist, Educator

I'm so sad to lose Marvin: truly a loss for us all. So many memories!

When I left Lucasfilm to jump into a new life as an MIT graduate student, I drove my little Honda Civic across the US, overloaded with my worldly possessions, aiming for Cambridge. I finally reached Brookline, where I moved into the attic of a funky mansion on Ivy Street: the Minsky attic. I felt like I had immediately been adopted. Marvin treated his children like students and students like his children.

The attic was not air conditioned, and it was sweltering hot in late August when I arrived. I tried to go to sleep. There was scribbling on the wall by the bed—little doodles and quips in pencil. I think Shannon had written something. Danny Hillis, maybe. Arthur C. Clarke had scribbled a bit. ("Yep, Arthur slept there," Marvin told me later).

Not surprisingly, sweating (did I mention, late August in a third floor attic with no a/c?), and head spinning, unable to process the idea that I was now living in Marvin Minsky’s attic, I couldn't get to sleep. So I went downstairs and grabbed a book and plopped down in the couch. Something crunched under my butt. It was a sheaf of paper, a draft printout of his work in progress, Society of Mind. I skipped to the end (a bad habit with me, wanting to see how it all worked out) and started reading. I was blown away by the Acknowledgments. So beautifully written! And gosh, the range of people whose influences he took time to appreciate. It was a who’s who, and not just in the world of information science. Marvin loved ideas, and he cherished people who believed in the invention of ideas (and the idea of inventions). Playing with ideas was the story of his wonderful, storied life. I'm sure the outpouring in days ahead will be extraordinary.

Marvin & me, at his daughter Margaret's wedding.

You might like to take a moment, and read the Postscript to Society of Mind. The book is strangely overwhelming, with charms on every page. But the Acknowledgments are to me the most beautiful part. Makes me wish our own Societies of People were as lovingly looked after.

In Jeremy Bernstein's 1981 New Yorker profile there's a quote I love. When Marvin was a student, he said, there appeared to him to be only three interesting problems in the world—or in the world of science, at least. “Genetics seemed to be pretty interesting, because nobody knew yet how it worked,” he said. “But I wasn’t sure that it was profound. The problems of physics seemed profound and solvable. It might have been nice to do physics. But the problem of intelligence seemed hopelessly profound. I can’t remember considering anything else worth doing.”

Hopelessly profound. That’s Marvin.

__________

Another Memory from Minsky’s Attic

After a month or two in the attic at Marvin and Gloria's house (don't all graduate students live in their advisor's attic?!), and one night got hungry. I tiptoed down to the kitchen to raid the fridge for a midnight snack. I opened the door. The fridge was packed with packages in brown butcher paper. It was all meat. Some of it looked like body parts. Frankenstein? In about a nanosecond I lost my appetite and went back upstairs.

Marvin noodling on the piano at EG.
That was a birthday hat: MLM 86 (Marvin Lee Minsky, for his 86th birthday).

The next morning I got up the courage to ask Marvin what the hell he was keeping in his fridge. "Oh, you looked in the wrong refrigerator" he said. "That one's just filled with seal blubber. It doesn’t taste very good."

Oh, right.

Wait . . . what?!

"Susan Butcher lives in Brookline. You know, the Iditarod champion? This is meat for her sled dog team."

Of course. Because if you're the world sled dog racing champion, and you’ve got a truckload of seal blubber for dog food, and you need a place to put it, who would you call?

__________

Finally, here's a beautiful piece WBUR patched together. The voices are Lisa Mullins (WBUR), me, Tod Machover, and Pat Winston. What’s running in the background is Marvin noodling on the piano, improvising at a fugue. Marvin loved music, as you know—another one of those “hopelessly profound” and seductive pools of wonder. I want people to "hear" Marvin play the piano—the right counterpoint to "seeing" Marvin playing in the above photograph.

Lee Smolin

Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Time Reborn

What was obvious for even those like myself who didn’t know Marvin well was his astounding capacity for delight and surprise. He had such an original way of seeing our possible futures. In one talk I heard him give, he attributed all the problems facing humanity to an excess of biomass. He proposed three ways technology could help: use genetic engineering to enable a child to have many parents; several people could share one body and keep their minds uploaded on the network when it wasn’t their turn to be embodied or, use genetic engineering and quantum computing to shrink people to the size of mice. The artist Vic Muniz, himself a master of surprise, responded instantly from the back of the room: “Marvin, you better shrink all the other animals first.”

Isn’t it delightfully ironic that Marvin, who had such a wonderfully playful intelligence, was a proponent of artificial intelligence? I would like to propose a second Turing test—the Minsky test—in which a machine would have to convince the respondent that it was an embodiment of Marvin.

Jaron Lanier

Computer Scientist; Musician; Author, Who Owns The Future?

The last time I saw Marvin, just a few months ago, he was hanging out in his wonderful house, front door unlocked, students dropping by unannounced. One young MIT student had worked for a summer in a circus, and naturally a trapeze hung from the vaulted ceiling. She slid upwards like a cat and swung about as we all argued about AI, just like it was forty years ago.

I remembered when that trapeze was being installed, and I was the young student. Why was it hung there? I don't remember, but it was also when the tuba arrived in its place under a piano, now obscured by books, telescope parts, many wonderful things.

On my way to see Marvin that night I got a call from a mutual friend. "Don't argue with him, he's frail." I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "But Marvin thrives on arguments."

I was right. Marvin said, "What you're doing, criticizing AI, it's perfect. If you're wrong in the big picture, you'll make AI better. There's a lot of terrible work, after all. If you're right in the big picture, then you're right. So great!"

Marvin invented about half of the way we think about ourselves these days. His particular way of characterizing AI consumed a million imaginations. Marvin's narrative about the future of machines is the thing people are afraid of. But that's a sideshow. The main event is that Marvin's way of thinking about people and our emotions has more or less replaced Freud's mythology. Pixar's Inside Out, for instance, feels and even looks like Marvin's lectures from decades ago. (He used to ask that we imagine our brains painting colors on memories of things or events so that we might react to them with a given emotion, for instance.)

And all this might be taken as an aside from his work at the foundations of computer science. And his technical contributions to so many other fields. The latest Virtual Reality optics have been influenced by one of Marvin's inventions, for instance: the confocal microscope.

Why was Marvin so generous to me? I gave him grief. I disagreed with him at every turn. I wasn't ever his student, officially, and yet he mentored me, inspired me, put serious time into helping me. His kindness was total, a singularity of kindness.

He came out to visit in California in the 1980s, when I was in my twenties and Virtual Reality was getting tolerable. He sat in a headset—was it a simulation of being inside a hippocampus with neurons firing?—while at the same time playing a real physical grand piano, and somehow the two planes of reality became beautifully coordinated.

The music! Everyone knows Marvin improvised at the piano in the approximate style of Bach—elaborate counterpoint—but he never ever fell into a rut. He was just as fascinated by the obscure musical instruments I brought by, from around the world. Since everything was always new to Marvin, even Bach's style was always brand new. Marvin lacked the capacity to become jaded, bored, or fall into any state of mind shy of being startled by the constant novelty of reality.

I remember Marvin talking to Margaret, his daughter, and me about his take on Alan Watts. It's hard to imagine a philosopher who might seem more distant from Marvin than the guru-like, Asian-leaning Watts, and yet Marvin thought Watts was remarkably wise about death. I recall Marvin discussing Watt's idea that reincarnation is the wave way of interpreting people instead of the particle way. (Not that Marvin, or Watts, for that matter, accepted the notion of individual survival through incarnations. Instead a person's properties or patterns would eventually reappear, approximately, in new combinations in fresh sets of people.)

I remember once we were walking near some shops on a spring day in Cambridge and we came upon an infant in a stroller. Marvin starting talking about "it" as if the baby were a device, a gadget, and I completely knew he was doing so to get a rise out of me. "It's able to track objects in the visual field, but with limited interaction capabilities; it has not yet built up a corpus of observed behavioral properties to correlate with visual stimuli." Oh, that sly smile. He guessed I was the one who'd get all huffy and thus prove that I was the slave to my ideas. Marvin's warmth shown through so radiantly that the rouse didn't work. We laughed.

Marvin linked humor with wisdom. Humor was his brain's way of noticing a hole to fill, a way to be wiser. I always think of him finding a way to make each moment a little funnier, a little wiser, a little warmer, a little kinder. He never failed at that, so far as I ever saw.

Kevin Kelly

Senior Maverick, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable

If you were seeking an unconventional view of the world, you eventually found yourself on a pilgrimage to Marvin Minsky's house in Brookline, Mass, just outside of Boston. That's how I came to know Marvin. I was researching artificial life and complex systems and all paths from there intersected with Marvin. He had unorthodox ideas on everything—especially on unorthodox subjects.

When I visited his home Marvin had no reason to let me barge into his house. I was not a former student, nor a scientist, nor a well-known author. I was a deep fan of his book Society of Minds. I was so impressed by his notions that I ran excerpts from it in the magazine I was editing. But almost no one else seemed to pay it much attention to his masterpiece at the time. Perhaps that is why I found myself at his doorstep in the late 1980s.

I remember there seemed to be a year's worth of unopened blue-wrapped newspapers stacked very neatlyon his porch. Hundreds. There must have been a bug in a household routine that lead to this, but what? The newspaper company refused to stop delivering? They had the wrong address? He really did intend to read them eventually? Inside his house there was more clutter except in two places. His kitchen table and the piano in his living room.

Marvin didn't talk like he wrote. His conversation was far more experimental, tentative, exploratory. For him, talking to a visitor was time to think aloud, roll out some old notions he had in a new context, or try out some new ideas, ideally ideas that he had never had even a moment before.

[My snapshot of Minsky in his kitchen, about 1989]

The thing that struck me more than anything else was his orthogonal take on just about everything. He would talk about music as if he was an alien visitor from another planet. "What are these vibrations for?" He might view a problem as if he were a machine. "What would a machine think about mental illness? It's just a bug." I came to think he was alien himself, or at least he trained himself to think like an alien. Or maybe he was a warm loving robot. Every interaction I had with Marvin over the years would always startle me with his ability to think different, like he was an AI from another planet. This mind-spectacle gave him a reliable way to see original solutions.

I don't know if Marvin really used that trick but what I learned from my brief encounters with him was to use that trick as often as I could when I was trying to thick about a problem or some unknown. Pretend you are not human; what would you see?

Daniel C. Dennett

Philosopher; Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, From Bacteria to Bach and Back

I’ve just sent some reminiscences of Marvin to his children, and have been rummaging through my memories, and I’ll share some of what I have recovered with Edge. My first meeting with Marvin, in the AI Lab at Tech Square back about 1973 or 74, was disconcerting. Everybody was talking about “the Frames paper” (eventually “A Framework for Representing Knowledge” MIT AI-Lab Memo 306, June 1974), and Marvin was having a great time in the Play Room refusing to make his points in stodgy regimented form, tying everyone up in knots. What I eventually came to realize was that there was a sort of temperature inversion in the AI Lab. Many academic departments and labs divide into the young Turks, who boldly defy the establishment rules, and the old farts, who wring their hands (or shake their fists) about the erosion of standards, the lack of discipline, and so forth. But Marvin, playing the unusual role of old Turk, was leading a bunch of young farts on a merry chase. When I heard the standard gag about him—the world’s smartest five-year-old—I got it immediately, and never thought of it as negative. His playfulness was what I particularly adored, even when it backfired, as it sometimes did.

Who else had a life-sized papier mache moose in his living room and a trapeze over the dining table? Then there were the two grand pianos, loaded down with dozens of robotic toys from around the world. A museum of curiosities to ravish the imagination of any smart child. One time when I went to discuss something with him at his home, he was on the phone when I got there, so I looked around at all the marvels in the living/dining room while waiting for him to finish his call. I was struck by a new table lamp on one of the shelves, the base made out of some intricate piece of presumably antique brass machinery. I looked at it, studied it, prodded and poked it, pushing the levers and turning the knobs, examining it in every way I could without picking it up or taking it apart, trying unsuccessfully to deduce what the lamp base had originally been. (I’ve actually written about such puzzles, in an essay on “Artifact Hermeneutics” and in several book chapters. I rather pride myself in my abilities as a reverse engineer.) But this time, I was stumped. When he finished the call, and turned to me, I asked, “OK, Marvin, I give up. What is it?” His answer: “It’s a lamp.” It had been made for him by a sculptor/tinkerer/constructor friend—I wish I could remember who—and it was a hook designed to catch me and people like me. It worked to perfection. I wonder how many others he caught with his lure.

I also remember a time when I invited him to Tufts for some sort of discussion with my students and they turned out to be entirely too docile and respectful in the company of such greatness, and they retreated into variations on deer-in-the-headlights. Marvin was never comfortable when everybody agrees and nobody puts up a fight, so he couldn’t just sit there and hold forth wisely. He started saying more and more outrageous things, trying to shock the students into some kind of rebuttal or challenge or even laughter. They sat stupefied, and possibly even alarmed. If I hadn’t finally intervened and challenged him on something (I had so wanted the students to do the disagreeing) I think he would have said that elephants fly and Mars is a movie set. Anything to cause a rumble.

Marvin Minsky’s many ways of thinking are an acquired taste, and lots of very smart people just don’t or won’t get it. I think those of us who learned so much from him should make sure we keep his books and articles in the syllabus, so that, although many of our students will turn away baffled, a few free spirits will be lifted out of their chairs, their heads swarming with new ideas, and carry on.

Neil Gershenfeld

Physicist, Director, MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms; Co-author, Designing Reality

I learned (at least) five life lessons from Marvin.

The most important was when he told me that when he was around 12 years old he figured out what it meant to become a grown-up, decided that didn't make sense, and decided not to. I've always aspired to emulate his model for how to (not) do that.

The second was optimal irresponsibility. He would neither do what was expected of him, which he observed would cause people to always ask him to do things. Nor would he not do what was expected of him, which would cause people to give up on him. Instead, he would respond in ways that were useful enough, but unpredictable enough, to let him decide what was worth doing.

Third came when he extracted me from a formal dinner, where I was bemoaning the difficulty of doing experimental science that didn't fit within traditional discipline boundaries, and brought me to MIT to start what became my lab and career. Rather than working back from what was possible, he would consistently work forward from what he thought should happen.

Fourth was his stories about what he learned from studying with "Johnny" von Neumann. That was my window into the mismatch between the legacy of von Neumann's architecture and the much more modest reality of what von Neumann actually thought about it. Not as a fundamental contribution but as what we would now call a hack, something von Neumann revisited later much more thoughtfully in thinking about the connection between physics and computation.

And fifth was how he gave talks. At any one time he had perhaps ten processes running in his brain; there was always a danger in whoever spoke to him last before a talk, because that would determine which of those processes was in control of his mouth at the time. But it also meant that listening to him talk was a window into watching him think, conveying not just what he thought but how he thought.

In retrospect, like so many others, I think I'm best understood as a linear combination of this basis set of Minsky vectors.

Rodney A. Brooks

Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus); Former Director, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (1997-2007); Founder, CTO, Robust.AI; Author, Flesh and Machines

Marvin Minsky is rightly being remembered for his foundational and continuing contributions to Artificial Intelligence. But let's not forget that he was also the most foundational person after Turing on computability. His 1967 book Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines is a mathematical masterpiece—I shall pull it off my bookshelf when I get home tonight from a multi-day trip and savor it once again, as I have so many times before. That book pulled together the threads of what computation meant, from Turing, Post, and Kleene, into coherent mathematical unity, and extended the questions and answers around what could be computed with many new insights and theorems. With this foundation, the theory of computation could turn to algorithmic complexity which has dominated the field ever since. That book is an amazing tour de force. For a normal mortal it would have been the defining point of a life's work. Forget about all that AI stuff he did!

Ray Kurzweil

Principal Developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition

When I was fourteen I wrote Marvin Minsky a letter asking to meet with him. He invited me to visit him at MIT and he spent hours with me as if he had nothing else to do. When my daughter Amy was about eleven and we went out for a meal at the Harvest Restaurant in Cambridge with my wife Sonya and his wife Gloria, Amy and Marvin built a large structure on the restaurant table using all of the silverware, experimenting with different ways that the utensils could create stable structures. There was no sense that he was working with an elementary school student. He approached this endeavor with the same combination of seriousness and whimsy that he would bring to his interactions with any colleague. He was the consummate educator, for that was his greatest joy and passion. But he was also many other things: a scientist, a mathematician, an inventor, an engineer, a roboticist, a writer, a philosopher, a polymath, a poet, a musician, and most of all a student of human nature and thinking. He was the principal pioneer of both the symbolic and connectionist schools of AI and made profound contributions that have enriched the field of computer science and all of science. He was one of humanity's great thinkers. He was also my only mentor. He will be deeply missed.

George Dyson

Science Historian ; Author, Turing’s Cathedral; Darwin Among the Machines

At the international conference on Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence [CETI] held at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory, Yerevan [Armenia] USSR, 5-11 September 1971, Marvin Minsky contributed not only his usual wealth of original ideas (including the statement that "instead of sending a picture of a cat, there is one area in which we can send the cat itself") but an actual flying rocket, as was documented in the proceedings. I asked him about this in 1994, and he replied:

"Yes. I brought a miniature water rocket to the meeting, assuming that it would amaze everyone, because it embodied such high technology in a plastic children's toy. The second stage was automatically launched from the top of the first stage when the first stage pressure fell low enough to release the docking device. The same company also actually made a 3-stage toy rocket -- and I don't recall which version I took to the meeting.

“The rocket worked very well, and the upper stage ended up on the roof of the Observatory. It may still be there, for all I know.

“The meeting was in all respects thrilling. I returned with Crick to Moscow for a few days. We got tired of being supervised, so one day we went for a stroll by leaving from a rear exit of the Academy of Sciences Hotel. When we returned, our "interpreter" was in tears. She said she feared she'd be punished severely if she "lost" us again.

“I argued that eventually we should be able to make nanorobots for interstellar travel, but most of the participants were skeptical about the possibility of intelligent machines of any size."

Links:
[1] https://www.edge.org/conversation/marvin_minsky-remembering-minsky