a story lives forever
Register
Sign in
Form submission failed!

Stay signed in

Recover your password?
Register
Form submission failed!

Web of Stories Ltd would like to keep you informed about our products and services.

Please tick here if you would like us to keep you informed about our products and services.

I have read and accepted the Terms & Conditions.

Please note: Your email and any private information provided at registration will not be passed on to other individuals or organisations without your specific approval.

Video URL

You must be registered to use this feature. Sign in or register.

NEXT STORY

The beginning of the Media Lab at MIT

RELATED STORIES

Nicholas Negroponte's lab: The Architecture Machine
Marvin Minsky Scientist
Comments (0) Please sign in or register to add comments

Nicholas Negroponte had a laboratory with a strange title; it was called the Architecture Machine. And... I think maybe this was because Nicholas’s... PhD thesis was based on a really remarkably humorous and interesting idea that... I don't know if I can explain it. It was a box that had a lot of guinea pigs and a lot of little wooden blocks. And in the course of their activities, the guinea pigs would run into the blocks and push them around and... Nicholas had some system, which would record – maybe just photographs – where the blocks were each day. And... he arranged some kind of plotting machine, which would... I think we may have to erase all this, but he had this machine that would observe that a block had been moved and reach down and move it back. And then, he would record whether the guinea pigs paid any attention to this or appeared to have any intentions about where they wanted the block to be. But I... I give up. I can’t remember the purpose, but anyway, that was called the Architecture Machine at first. And then, he had more students and Nicholas was incredibly productive at... at the beginning of computer science, of... thinking of things that no one else imagined computers doing.

Marvin Minsky (1927-2016) was one of the pioneers of the field of Artificial Intelligence, founding the MIT AI lab in 1970. He also made many contributions to the fields of mathematics, cognitive psychology, robotics, optics and computational linguistics. Since the 1950s, he had been attempting to define and explain human cognition, the ideas of which can be found in his two books, The Emotion Machine and The Society of Mind. His many inventions include the first confocal scanning microscope, the first neural network simulator (SNARC) and the first LOGO 'turtle'.

Listeners: Christopher Sykes

Christopher Sykes is a London-based television producer and director who has made a number of documentary films for BBC TV, Channel 4 and PBS.

Tags: The Architecture Machine, Nicolas Negroponte

Duration: 2 minutes, 1 second

Date story recorded: 29-31 Jan 2011

Date story went live: 13 May 2011