Marvin Minsky - Systems Quotes

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When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.

Marvin Minsky
I suspect our human "thinking processes" often "break down," but you rarely notice anything's wrong, because your systems so quickly switch you to think in different ways, while the systems that failed are repaired or replaced.

Marvin Minsky
In today's computer science curricula … almost all their time is devoted to formal classification of syntactic language types, defeatist unsolvability theories, folklore about systems programming, and generally trivial fragments of "optimization of logic design" — the latter often in situations where the art of heuristic programming has far outreached the special-case "theories" so grimly taught and tested — and invocations about programming style almost sure to be outmoded before the student graduates.

Marvin Minsky
It makes no sense to seek a single best way to represent knowledge-because each particular form of expression also brings its particular limitations. For example, logic-based systems are very precise, but they make it hard to do reasoning with analogies. Similarly, statistical systems are useful for making predictions, but do not serve well to represent the reasons why those predictions are sometimes correct.

Marvin Minsky
All intelligent persons also possess some larger-scale frame-systems whose members seemed at first impossibly different — like water with electricity, or poetry with music. Yet many such analogies — along with the knowledge of how to apply them — are among our most powerful tools of thought. They explain our ability sometimes to see one thing — or idea — as though it were another, and thus to apply knowledge and experience gathered in one domain to solve problems in another. It is thus that we transfer knowledge via the paradigms of Science. We learn to see gases and fluids as particles, particles as waves, and waves as envelopes of growing spheres.

Marvin Minsky
Every system that we build will surprise us with new kinds of flaws until those machines become clever enough to conceal their faults from us.

Marvin Minsky
A memory should induce a state through which we see current reality as an instance of the remembered event — or equivalently, see the past as an instance of the present.... the system can perform a computation analogous to one from the memorable past, but sensitive to present goals and circumstances.

Marvin Minsky