# Marvin Minsky Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) was an American cognitive scientist, co-founder of the MIT AI Lab, and one of the central figures of early [[Artificial Intelligence]]. A participant in the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop, he was a leading proponent of [[Symbolic AI]] and developed influential theories of mind (the "society of mind," intelligence as the interaction of many simple agents). He won the Turing Award in 1969. He is also remembered for the 1969 book *Perceptrons* (with Seymour Papert), whose critique of the single-layer Perceptron is widely credited with redirecting funding away from neural networks and helping trigger the first AI winter — a consequential, and in hindsight overcorrecting, intervention in the symbolic-versus-connectionist war (see Connectionism). In his later years Minsky's name surfaced in connection with the Jeffrey Epstein network (he had visited Epstein's properties); he died in 2016 before those associations were widely scrutinized. ## See Also - [[Symbolic AI]] — the paradigm he led - Perceptron — the neural-network model his critique buried - Dartmouth Workshop — the founding meeting he joined