Marvin Lee Minsky (born the August 9th 1927) is a American Scientifique. He works in the field of the cognitive Sciences and the Artificial intelligence. He is also cofounder, with the data processing specialist John McCarthy of the Group of artificial intelligence of the Massachusetts Institute off Technology (MIT) and author of many publications as well in artificial intelligence as in Philosophie like, for example, the Company of the Spirit ( The Society off Mind ). Its last work, The Emotion Machine, not published in French, propose new developments on these theories.

In 1969, in Perceptrons, coécrit with Seymour Papert, it showed the limits of the Réseaux of neurons of the type Perceptron, in particular impossibility of dealing with nonlinear problems or of connexity. This resulted in to drain the main part of the research appropriations towards the artificial intelligence symbolic system.

Marvin Minsky defends the idea that the artificial intelligence must use multiple approaches, in particular for the representation of knowledge, instead of limiting itself to only one approach which would be supposed being the best. The systems must have " gestionnaires" , able to select the best solutions with a given problem.

To represent knowledge, Marvin Minsky developed the concept of frame and the Frame representation language.

In the Company of the Spirit , Marvin Minsky presents the spirit like an architecture of elementary, independent, but especially hierarchical agents. The most current agents are the lines K ( K-lines ), agents of short-term memory being used to activate a given whole of agents. The activation of lines K can for example make it possible to find a particular configuration of agents which proved to be effective.

The nemes are agents representing knowledge, whereas the name are agents able to treat knowledge. The polynemes make it possible to activate agencies representing of the aspects different from the same object. The paranomists allow to handle simultaneously various modes of representations of knowledge.

These basic agents will combine to form agencies of bigger size capable of complex operations (frames, frame-arrays, transframes). Minsky introduces the concept of " B" brain; , whose role is to supervise and examine the outside world not, but the spirit itself (brain A), by correcting the errors or while putting an end to an unproductive mental activity (loops, repetitions). This division of the spirit in " levels of réflexion" fact the object of new developments in more recent work of Minsky.

An intelligent system will have two types of agents, the specialists and the administrative . The specialists can implement the known techniques of artificial intelligence to solve precise problems (systems containing rules, networks semantic, networks bayesiens). The managers are charged to plan, to select the specialists, to evaluate the results obtained.

Marvin Minsky is also the joint author of the problem of Turing , novel of Science-fiction and thriller where it is question of a young genius which designs the first strong Artificial intelligence in 2023. The site of Marvin Minsky proposes two new chapters which one can download.