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Marvin Minsky - 'You can pull something with a string, but not push it' (75/151)

4,956 views · Published 31 October 2016 · 2:03 · Indexed 6 November 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2016 · Science & Technology

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To hear more of Marvin Minsky’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB2SsvcECzI&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFxJatFYBb7P4NZscvJw1f0r

The scientist, Marvin Minsky (1927-2016) was one of the pioneers of the field of Artificial Intelligence, having founded the MIT AI Lab in 1970. Since the 1950s, his work involved trying to uncover human thinking processes and replicate them in machines. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2011]

TRANSCRIPT: Right. OK, well I told this little story of the attempts to make programs that do mathematics, so that’s sort of the strange backwards evolution where, in 1961, the student James Slagle made a program that could do integration, as well as a good college student, and then Daniel Bobrow, another graduate student, made the program that was pretty good at some high school algebra problems and... while all this was going on, there was also a series of attempts to make programs that could prove theorems in Euclidian geometry, so that... that had a nice history going back to around 1958.

So we have these rather advanced subjects, at least as a typical public citizen would see it... doing calculus or algebra is pretty exceptional, but we don’t have a system that understands enough about the real world to... to know that you can pull with a string – my favorite example – but... but you can’t push or... knows that normally people don’t like to get wet, so they... if they’re going out in the rain they’ll probably get an umbrella, but they won’t take an umbrella when they go swimming, because then.. then they want to get wet or they don’t mind it.

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