Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 to January 24, 2016) was an American mathematician and computer scientist who co-founded the artificial intelligence laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and spent his career studying how to give machines perception, reasoning, and common sense. Within virtual and augmented reality his most direct contribution is the term Telepresence, which he introduced in a 1980 essay in Omni magazine to describe systems that let a person feel present at a distant location through high-quality sensory feedback and remote-controlled mechanical effectors.
Minsky received the Turing Award in 1969 for his work in artificial intelligence. He also built early robotic manipulators and invented the confocal scanning microscope. His ideas about the sense of "being there", the role of feedback, and the coupling of human senses to artificial devices anticipated concerns that later became central to VR research, where the same goal is described as Presence.
Early life and education
Minsky was born in New York City on August 9, 1927. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1950 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1954, where his doctoral advisor was Albert W. Tucker.[1] His dissertation, "Theory of Neural-Analog Reinforcement Systems and Its Application to the Brain Model Problem", reflected an early interest in how nervous systems learn.[2]
While a graduate student in 1951 Minsky designed and built SNARC (Stochastic Neural-Analog Reinforcement Computer), described as the first randomly wired neural network learning machine.[3]
Career at MIT
Minsky joined the faculty of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1958, and the following year, 1959, he co-founded the institute's Artificial Intelligence Project, which grew into the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (now the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, CSAIL).[4] He served as co-director of the AI Laboratory from 1959 to 1974.[3] In 1985 he became a founding member of the MIT Media Lab, where he remained as a professor until his death.[4]
At the AI Lab Minsky's stated aim was to explore how to endow machines with human-like perception and intelligence. He created robotic hands that can manipulate objects, and, with Seymour Papert, helped develop the first "turtle" device for the LOGO programming language.[4] Minsky and Papert co-wrote Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry (1969), an analysis of the limits of simple neural networks that influenced the direction of the field for years.[2]
In 1974 Minsky published the MIT AI memo "A Framework for Representing Knowledge", which introduced the idea of "frames" as structured representations of stereotyped situations, a model widely used in knowledge representation.[5] He later set out his broader theory of mind in The Society of Mind (1986), which describes intelligence as the product of interactions among many simple, individually unintelligent agents, and returned to related themes in The Emotion Machine (2006).[6][2]
Minsky was an adviser to Stanley Kubrick on the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Arthur C. Clarke's companion novel refers to Minsky by name in connection with a fictional breakthrough in artificial intelligence.[2]
Inventions and hardware
Confocal microscope
In 1957 Minsky designed the first confocal scanning microscope, an optical instrument that rejects out-of-focus light by placing illumination and detection pinholes in conjugate (confocal) image planes, which sharpens the resulting image. He filed U.S. Patent 3,013,467, "Microscopy apparatus", on November 7, 1957; it was granted on December 19, 1961.[7] The design is regarded as a predecessor of the confocal laser scanning microscopes used widely in biology today.[4]
Robotic manipulators
Minsky built early robotic arms and hands that were among the first machines able to sense and manipulate objects under computer control.[3] His best-known device is the Tentacle Arm of 1968, built with Bill Bennett and sometimes called the Minsky-Bennett arm. It had twelve joints, each a single degree of freedom actuated by a hydraulic piston, was controlled by a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-6 computer, and was strong enough to lift the weight of a person while bending around obstacles.[8] A position transducer alongside each piston let the arm follow a separate replica control arm, a master-slave arrangement of the kind used in teleoperation.[8] The arm is now held by the MIT Museum.[8]
A separate claim, that Minsky built the "first head-mounted graphical display" in 1963, appears in his academic biography among a list of his inventions.[3] The Head-mounted display that drove a viewer from live computer graphics is usually attributed to Ivan Sutherland, who built the device later nicknamed the Sword of Damocles in 1968 with Bob Sproull, so the 1963 attribution to Minsky should be treated with caution and is not corroborated by VR histories.[9]
Telepresence and relevance to VR and AR
Minsky's clearest link to virtual and augmented reality is the concept of Telepresence, set out in an essay of that title in the June 1980 issue of Omni magazine.[10][11] In the essay Minsky wrote that scientists often used the words "teleoperator" or "telefactor" for remote-control tools, and added: "I prefer to call this 'telepresence', a name suggested by my futurist friend Patrick Gunkel."[12]
The system Minsky described centers on instrumented clothing coupled to a remote robot. "You don a comfortable jacket lined with sensors and muscle-like motors", he wrote. "Each motion of your arm, hand, and fingers is reproduced at another place by mobile, mechanical hands."[12] He argued that the defining problem was not the mechanics but the experience: "The biggest challenge to developing telepresence is achieving that sense of 'being there.'"[12] To reach it he stressed feedback quality, calling for instruments "that will feel and work so much like our own hands that we won't notice any significant difference."[10]
That emphasis on the feeling of "being there" maps directly onto the idea of Presence that VR researchers later adopted as a primary design goal, the subjective sense of existing inside a mediated environment rather than merely viewing it. The International Society for Presence Research cites Minsky's 1980 essay as an early formulation of the field it studies.[13] The same coupling of human sensorimotor channels to remote or synthetic devices through tracked motion and force or haptic feedback underlies modern teleoperated robotics, remote surgery, and the controller and glove interfaces used in Virtual reality and Augmented reality.[10][13]
Minsky framed telepresence as a near-term engineering goal with broad applications rather than science fiction. The essay pointed to nuclear power generation and waste handling (he wrote that "Three Mile Island really needed telepresence"), mining, microsurgery, deep-sea work, and construction in space.[10][12] IEEE Spectrum republished the essay in 2010 as part of a report on robotic telepresence, linking Minsky's early framing to contemporary work.[10]
Minsky's wider research program is also part of the intellectual background of immersive computing. His work on perception, knowledge representation through frames, and the architecture of mind in The Society of Mind addressed how an agent builds and updates an internal model of its surroundings, a problem that recurs in tracking, scene understanding, and avatar behavior for VR and AR systems.[6][5]
Awards and recognition
| Year | Honor |
|---|---|
| 1969 | A.M. Turing Award (Association for Computing Machinery) |
| 1973 | Elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences |
| 1989 | Elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering |
| 1990 | Japan Prize |
| 1991 | IJCAI Award for Research Excellence |
| 2001 | Benjamin Franklin Medal |
| 2013 | BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award |
| 2014 | Dan David Prize |
Source: ACM Turing Award profile and Wikipedia biography.[1][2]
Death
Minsky died on January 24, 2016, at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 88.[4]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Marvin Minsky - A.M. Turing Award Laureate". https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/minsky_7440781.cfm.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 "Marvin Minsky". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 "Brief Academic Biography of Marvin Minsky". https://www.mit.edu/~dxh/marvin/web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/minskybiog.html.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 "Marvin Minsky, "father of artificial intelligence," dies at 88". 2016-01-25. https://news.mit.edu/2016/marvin-minsky-obituary-0125.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Selected Publications of Marvin Minsky". https://www.mit.edu/~dxh/marvin/web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/bibliography.html.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Society Of Mind". https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Society-Of-Mind/Marvin-Minsky/9780671657130.
- ↑ "US3013467A - Microscopy apparatus". https://patents.google.com/patent/US3013467A/en.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 "1968 - Minsky-Bennett Arm - Marvin Minsky and Bill Bennett (American)". https://cyberneticzoo.com/underwater-robotics/1968-minsky-bennett-arm-marvin-minsky-and-bill-bennett-american/.
- ↑ "The Sword of Damocles (virtual reality)". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sword_of_Damocles_(virtual_reality).
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 "Marvin Minsky's Telepresence Manifesto". 2010-08-31. https://spectrum.ieee.org/telepresence-a-manifesto.
- ↑ "Publication: Omni, June 1980". https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?59862.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 "Telepresence". 1980. https://web.mit.edu/dxh/www/marvin/web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Telepresence.html.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 "Marvin Minsky (1927-2016) and telepresence". 2016-02-01. https://ispr.info/2016/02/01/marvin-minsky-1927-2016-and-telepresence/.