The Society of Mind is the theory, emerging in the 1970s, that natural intelligence arises from the interactions of numerous simple agents, each of which, taken individually, is “mindless”, but, collectively, give rise to intelligence: “What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.” [Minsky 1988]

When you talk to a person, it's safe to assume that you both share large bodies of "common sense knowledge." But when you converse with a programmed computer, neither of you is likely to know much about what the other one knows.

Article Free Access Share on The emotion machine (invited speech): from pain to suffering Author: Marvin Minsky MIT, Cambridge MA MIT, Cambridge MAView Profile Authors Info & Claims IUI '00: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Intelligent user interfacesJanuary 2000 Pages 187–193https://doi.org/10.1145/325737.325833Online:09 January 2000Publication History 0citation540DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads540Last 12 Months15Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my Alerts New Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

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AUSTRAC' r.An excessive preoccupation with formalism is impeding the development of computer science.Form-content confusion is discussed relative to three areas: theory of computation, programming languages, and education. KEY WORDS AND PHRASES;

When is a set A of positive integers, represented as binary numbers, “regular” in the sense that it is a set of sequences that can be recognized by a finite-state machine? Let π A ( n ) be the number of members of A less than the integer n . It is shown that the asymptotic behavior of π A ( n ) is subject to severe restraints if A is regular. These constraints are violated by many important natural numerical sets whose distribution functions can be calculated, at least asymptotically. These include the set P of prime numbers for which π P ( n ) @@@@ n /log n for large n , the set of integers A ( k ) of the form n k for which π A ( k ) n ) @@@@ n P/k , and many others. The technique cannot, however, yield a decision procedure for regularity since for every infinite regular set A there is a nonregular set A′ for which | π A ( n ) — π A′ ( n ) | ≤ 1, so that the asymptotic behaviors of the two distribution functions are essentially identical.

By a simple direct construction it is shown that computations done by Turing machines can be duplicated by a very simple symbol manipulation process. The process is described by a simple form of Post canonical system with some very strong restrictions. This system is monogenic : each formula (string of symbols) of the system can be affected by one and only one production (rule of inference) to yield a unique result. Accordingly, if we begin with a single axiom (initial string) the system generates a simply ordered sequence of formulas, and this operation of a monogenic system brings to mind the idea of a machine. The Post canonical system is further restricted to the “Tag” variety, described briefly below. It was shown in [1] that Tag systems are equivalent to Turing machines. The proof in [1] is very complicated and uses lemmas concerned with a variety of two-tape nonwriting Turing machines. The proof here avoids these otherwise interesting machines and strengthens the main result; obtaining the theorem with a best possible deletion number P = 2. Also, the representation of the Turing machine in the present system has a lower degree of exponentiation, which may be of significance in applications. These systems seem to be of value in establishing unsolvability of combinatorial problems.