Marvin L. Minsky, one of the patriarchs of artificial intelligence, is in a feisty mood. The man who co-organized the 1956 conference that launched the quest for artificial intelligence and set off a search for the holy grail of "thinking" computers now sits on a couch in his Brookline (Mass.) living room and chastises those who would reduce his grand vision to a series of equations that solve a simple problem.
The idea of software that replicates human thinking still burns brightly in Minsky's brain. But progress toward his goal has slowed, he says, because AI "was taken over by people who tried to be too formal and mathematical about it."
