Busy, So So Busy

2 thoughts on “Busy, So So Busy”

1. LA March 23, 2005 at 8:51 am

   you probably already know all this. But i found it interesting. See if you can further Minskys work..——————————————————————————————————
   From my sci fi bookclub info…..

   Marvin Minsky Makes Machines Think

   From his earliest years, Marvin Minsky, “the father of Artificial Intelligence,” loved to build machines. Frustrated by the limits of his toys, the young engineer began dismantling his father’s optical equipment until the eye surgeon was forced to buy his son a truckload of junkyard parts. But Minsky’s talent for tinkering and his brief exposure to medical machinery helped shape his lifelong ambition: to create a device capable of thought.

   While a graduate student at Princeton in 1951, Minsky built the first primitive neural network learning machine from surplus World War II army equipment, including 400 vacuum tubes and 40 magnetic clutches. Unlike traditional computers, which must follow a specific order of programmed instructions to complete a task, Minsky’s machine was designed to attempt several approaches to solving a problem. When the network performed certain tasks successfully, the instructions for that task were stored so that they could be instantly recalled, teaching the network to recognize patterns of effective behavior. In effect, the machine was teaching itself. Minsky’s network was “smart” enough to simulate a rat learning its way through a maze.

   Minsky’s neural network laid the foundation for much of the later work done on neural nets, including his own more advanced research in 1969 based on more powerful learning algorithms called perceptrons. Today, neural networks used in fraud detection, credit approval, and target marketing have origins in Minsky’s pioneering work.

   Long affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is now a professor, Minsky has watched his machines advance fields as diverse as robotics, computerized vision, speech recognition, and parallel processing. While he still hasn’t achieved his most elusive goal–a machine that thinks like a human, computers and other devices are closer to human reasoning than ever, thanks to Minsky’s efforts.

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2. AMP March 23, 2005 at 10:00 pm

   Oh John, these past weeks have been horrible for everyone! And plus– you are in the engineering dept. for UofM. Which is horribly hard work!!!!!!!!! Anyways, you shall make it, and this is kind of sappy haha. But hey.

   By the way–you should make your entry into a Haiku. 🙂

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