Marvin Minsky, the artificial intelligence pioneer who helped make machines think, leading to computers that understand spoken commands and beat grandmasters at chess, has died at the age of 88, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said. Minsky, who died on Sunday, suffered a cerebral haemorrhage, the school said.
Minsky had "a monster brain," MIT colleague Patrick Winston, a professor of artificial intelligence and computer science, said in a 2012 interview. He could be intimidating without meaning to be because he was "such a genius," Winston said. Minsky's greatest contribution to computers and artificial intelligence was the notion that neither human nor machine intelligence is a single process. Instead, he argued, intelligence arises from the interaction of numerous processes in a "society of mind" - a phrase Minsky used for the title of his 1985 book. "Marvin basically figured out that thinking isn't a thing but an embarrassing mess of dumb things that work together, as in a society," said Danny Hillis, a former Minsky student and now co-chairman of the Applied Minds technology company.
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