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A founding father of artificial intelligence.
Marvin Lee Minsky had no patience for those who doubted that computers could be intelligent at a human level or beyond. In the late 1950s, building on the work of Alan Turing, along with computer scientists John McCarthy, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell, Minsky started the work that led everyone to think of this group as the founders of the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Were it not for their determined advocacy, AI might have foundered.
Minsky, who died on 24 January, was born in New York City in 1927. After serving in the US Navy in the Second World War, he earned a degree in mathematics in 1950 from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he impressed the mathematician Andrew Gleason by proving fixed-point theorems in topology. During his doctorate on learning machines, at Princeton University in New Jersey, he built one out of vacuum tubes and motors.
When Minsky finished his PhD, the eminent mathematicians John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon all recommended him for appointment as a junior fellow at Harvard. During this time, he became curious about how the brain works, but was frustrated by the limitations of conventional microscopy, which could not provide clear images of thick, light-scattering neural tissue. This led to his invention of the confocal scanning microscope, which uses lenses to focus light on successively small volumes.
In the late 1950s, with McCarthy, he...