Marvin Minsky, artificial intelligence pioneer, RIP

MIT professor Marvin Minsky, a "founding father" of the field of artificial intelligence whose work opened up new vistas in computer science, cognitive psychology, philosophy, robotics, and optics, has died of a brain hemorrhage. He was 88.

In 1959, Minsky co-founded MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (now the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) and dedicated his career to exploring how we might replicate the functions of the human brain in a machine, a research journey he hoped would help us better understand our own minds.

"No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing," Minsky once said. "But most of the time, we aren't either."

(New York Times)