CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – A pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who saw parallels in the functioning of the human brain and computers has died. Marvin Minsky was 88.
The university says Minsky died Sunday at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston of a cerebral hemorrhage.
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Minsky viewed the brain as a machine whose functioning can be studied, and replicated in a computer and considered how machines might be endowed with common sense.
Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, says Minsky “helped create the vision of artificial intelligence as we know it today.”
Minsky served in the Navy during World War II, before earning mathematics degrees from Harvard and Princeton. He joined MIT’s faculty in 1958.
He’s survived by his wife and three children.
Featured image courtesy flickr user Joi Ito. Used under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.
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