Explore Quotes by Marvin Minsky

We wanted to solve robot problems and needed some vision, action, reasoning, planning, and so forth. We even used some structural learning, such as was being explored by Patrick Winston.

You don't understand anything unless you understand there are at least 3 ways.

The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

Minds are simply what brains do.

But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler's discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.

It's ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute.

I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience... How would they know?

Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws.

It would be as useless to perceive how things 'actually look' as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.

We must see that music theory is not only about music, but about how people process it. To understand any art, we must look below its surface into the psychological details of its creation and absorption.

Listening to music engages the previously acquired personal knowledge of the listener.

You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.

If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.

Each part of the mind sees only a little of what happens in some others, and that little is swiftly refined, reformulated and "represented." We like to believe that these fragments have meanings in themselves - apart from the great webs of structure from which they emerge - and indeed this illusion is valuable to us qua thinkers - but not to us as psychologists - because it leads us to think that expressible knowledge is the first thing to study.

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.