Saturday, February 9, 2008

Day 0: The Emotion Machine

"I hope this book will be useful to everyone who seeks ideas about how human minds might work, or who wants suggestions about better ways to think, or who aims toward building smarter machines"

This is exactly how a book explaining how the brain could possibly work should start. Thanks to Marvin Minsky that is exactly the way that The Emotion Machine (Simon & Schuster, 2006) begins.
Marvin Minsky is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the MIT.
Professor Minsky is one of the pioneers of intelligence-based robotics.

The Emotion Machine is the Day zero of our road trip.

The book presents through its nine chapters the theories of the Professor, trying to break the wall there where previous theories have failed.
Topics like love, pain, consciousness and common sense are faced and demystified. The Professor shows a possible path to follow to push the research beyond the actual limits, suggesting new models of how to represent the brain and how our thinking might actually work (see also The Society of Mind). Many ingredients are presented in more or less detail but the outcome is clear and there is enough new material to support many experiments in this following decade.

During our road trip we will propose a solution of how to fill in the remaining gaps of the theory providing the necessary engineering underneath required by a concrete implementation.

Day zero ends with a personal acknowledgment to Professor Minsky, to the man who awakened our dreams.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks. You made several points that most other reviewers missed! In fact, quite a few brain-scientists complained that the book made too many assertions without evidence. But of course, that evidence doesn't yet exist, and the book was mainly intended to suggest things that they should be looking for. For example, some of them asked questions like, "what's the evidence that our brain contain 'critics'" -- in spite of the terribly obvious fact that every normal person is always noticing when their thinking gets stuck.

Anyway, thank you again! -- marvin minsky

Tarelli said...

Thanks for the comment! This blog was born to take advantage of the collective intelligence from the net, but knowing that out there Professor Minsky is reading about our progress make us even more committed!