Computer scientist Marvin Minsky dies

Marvin Minsky isn’t quite as well known as some of the early computer or internet pioneers, but artificial intelligence-a concept he worked to make real-has undoubtedly influence the way we all live our lives. The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage, according to his family.

Minsky, a professor emeritus at the MIT Media Lab, was a pioneering thinker and the foremost expert on the theory of artificial intelligence.

The world lost another pioneer on January 24, 2016, one by the name of Marvin Minsky.

Fascinated since his undergraduate days at Harvard by the mysteries of human intelligence and thinking, Mr. Minsky saw no difference between the thinking processes of humans and those of machines. MIT’s obituary for their renowned professor says Minsky foresaw that humans would one day develop machines that rival their own intelligence, but was impatient of the delays from a lack of funding and researchers.

In 1951, Minsky built “SNARC” (short for Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator) – a neural network that could be considered the first artificial learning machine. It planted the seed for the idea that digital information should be shared freely, a notion that would shape the open-source software movement, and it was a part of the original ARPAnet, the forerunner to the Internet.

In the 1960s, Minsky developed some of the first mechanical arms, laying the foundation for modern robotics. Minsky won a series of global awards including computer science’s highest prize, the Turing Award.

These were just a few of Minsky’s many achievements, which also spanned fields such as computational linguistics, mathematics, and optics.