Search Search Professor Marvin Minsky: Mathematician and inventor inspired by Alan Turing to become a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence Minsky devoted his career to the hypothesis that engineers could someday create an intelligent machine Click to follow The Independent Online Minsky at a seminar in Seattle in 1987, ‘Artificial Intelligence: Society’s Atlas or Achilles?
’ AP Marvin Minsky was a founding father of the field of artificial intelligence and an innovative explorer of the mysteries of the human mind during his long tenure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
 He was a professor emeritus at MIT's Media Lab, which has a broad, interdisciplinary mandate to explore technology, multimedia and design.
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" Other such words include "creativity" and "emotion".
 In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history In pictures: Artificial intelligence through history Boston Dynamics describes itself as 'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'.
 It has created robots for DARPA, the US' military research company Google has been using similar technology to build self-driving cars, and has been pushing for legislation to allow them on the roads The DARPA Urban Challenge, set up by the US Department of Defense, challenges driverless cars to navigate a 60 mile course in an urban environment that simulates guerilla warfare Deep Blue, a computer created by IBM, won a match against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.
 The computer could evaluate 200 million positions per second, and Kasparov accused it of cheating after the match was finished Another computer created by IBM, Watson, beat two champions of US TV series Jeopardy at their own game in 2011 Apple's virtual assistant for iPhone, Siri, uses artificial intelligence technology to anticipate users' needs and give cheeky reactions Xbox's Kinect uses artificial intelligence to predict where players are likely to go, an track their movement more accurately Along with fellow AI pioneer John McCarthy, Minsky founded the artificial intelligence lab at MIT in 1959.
 His 1960 paper Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence laid out many of the routes researchers would take in the decades to come.
 He wrote, "we are on the threshold of an era that will be strongly influenced, and quite possibly dominated, by intelligent problem-solving machines.
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 "About 10 years after the original patent expired, it started to become a standard tool in biology and materials science.
" In 1956, when the very idea of a computer was only a couple of decades old, Minsky attended a two-month symposium at Dartmouth College that is considered the founding event in the field of artificial intelligence.
 Read more intelligence Minsky said last year that Alan Turing was the first person to bring respectability to the idea that machines might one day think.