Marvin Minsky

Last week, the Media Lab organized a memorial event for Marvin Minsky. The main event space had large life-size images of Marvin’s living room on all sides; I had been lucky enough to visit Marvin and Gloria a few times over the last three years (courtesy Brian Silverman and Cynthia Solomon), and I’m glad that the living room was an integral part of celebrating Marvin’s life and legacy. Each table in the post-event reception had a large pile of fortune cookies in the middle, and each of these fortune cookies had a “Marvinism” inside. Here’s an example (Hiroshi Ishii tweeted a list of all the Marvinisms in the cookies):

For those who can read Bangla, I also wrote a short piece on Marvin for the “Bigyan” (বিজ্ঞান) e-zine; you can read it here.