Pioneer in AI has died

Prof. Minsky at MIT in 1968

On January 24, 2016, Marvin Minsky died at age 88. Our engineering students should be aware of who this man was and what he achieved in his lifetime.

His work is relevant to just about every field of engineering as one of the "founding fathers" of artificial intelligence. He was working in this field at a time when no one even knew what AI was or could be.

As was written in his obituary in the New York Times:

"Well before the advent of the microprocessor and the supercomputer, Professor Minsky, a revered computer science educator at M.I.T., laid the foundation for the field of artificial intelligence by demonstrating the possibilities of imparting common-sense reasoning to computers."

Link to the obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/business/marvin-minsky-pioneer-in-artificial-intelligence-dies-at-88.html?&_r=0

There is so much that students could focus on for discussion about this man and his life's work, but one part of the obituary particularly caught my attention for students to consider:

"Professor Minsky's book, 'The Society of Mind,' a seminal work published in the mid-1980s, proposed 'that intelligence is not the product of any singular mechanism but comes from the managed interaction of a diverse variety of resourceful agents,' as he wrote on his website.

Underlying that hypothesis was his and Professor Papert's belief that there is no real difference between humans and machines. Humans, they maintained, are actually machines of a kind whose brains are made up of many semiautonomous but intelligent 'agents.' And different tasks, they said, 'require fundamentally different mechanisms.'" (my emphasis)

It also strkes me that there is a lot of language work than can be done with this article - or, in fact - with any obituary.

• A writing task in which students write a short summary of a person's achievements. They could pick a person they admire or are interested in (in their field, for example) and write the first paragraph of their "obituary." Summary writing practices both reading and writing skills, and focused students to get to the point in their writing.
• Work with relative clauses: examples of both restrictive and non-restrictive clauses, which all obituaries have.
• Work with parenthetical clauses to create complex sentences.
• Develop writing style by identifying and using non-finite introductory clauses. This extends students' ability to combine ideas in one sentence, rather than write a series of short, simplistic sentences.

All of these features are generally in obituaries, and there are many examples in this particular one.

Here is the first paragraphof the NYT obituary:

"Marvin Minsky, who combined a scientist's thirst for knowledge with a philosopher's quest for truth as a pioneering explorer of artificial intelligence, work that helped inspire the creation of the personal computer and the Internet, died on Sunday night in Boston. He was 88."

This paragraph is not only a concise summary of who the man was, but it also contains both a restrictive and non-restrictive clause. The rest of the article has many more.

A few examples of restrictive clauses:

•  (work) that helped inspire the creation of the personal computer and the Internet, ...
•  whose visions and perspectives liberated the computer ...
• (advances) that influenced modern robotics ...
• (one of the people) who defined what computing and computing research is all about, ...

A few examples of non-restrictive clauses:

• (Marvin Minsky), who combined a scientist's thirst for knowledge with a philosopher's quest for truth as a pioneering explorer of artificial intelligence, ...
• (John McCarthy), who is credited with coining the term "artificial intelligence."
• (machine), which he called Snarc.
• (Princeton), where he met John McCarthy, ...

A few examples of parenthetical clauses:

•  Professor Minsky, a revered computer scientist at M.I.T., laid the foundation for ...
•  Professor Minsky's book "The Society of Mind," a seminal work published in the mid-1980s, proposed "that ...
• After ruling out genetics as interesting but not profound, and physics as mildly enticing, he chose to focus on intelligence itself.
• Danny Hillis, an inventor and entrepreneur, co-founded Thinking Machines ...

A few examples of non-finite introductory clauses:

• Fascinated since his undergraduate days at Harvard by the mysteries of human intelligence and thinking, Professor Minsky ....
• Beginning in the early 1950s, he worked on ...
• While earning a degree in mathematics at Harvard, he also studied music ...
• Fascinated by electronics and science, the young Mr. Minsky ...
• Intellectually restless throughout his life, Professor Minsky ...

Obituaries of Prof. Minsky from other news sources could also be read, since the information is certainly of interest to our students, and obituaries usually have the language features I have focused on.