Marvin Minsky obituary

Pioneer of artificial intelligence research

Marvin Minsky, who has died aged 88, was a pioneer of artificial intelligence. In 1958 he co-founded the Artificial Intelligence Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Subsequently known as the AI Lab, it became a mecca for artificial intelligence research.

His published works included Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence (1960), a manifesto that profoundly shaped AI in its earliest days, and Society of Mind (1985), which postulated that the brain is fundamentally an assembly of interacting, specialised, autonomous agents for tasks such as visual processing and knowledge management. That view of the architecture of the mind remains a cornerstone of AI research.