Is H2G2's Marvin actually MIT AI lab's Minsky?
On Monday morning, two books got me thinking. They were sitting cover by cover on the backseat.
To the left was the nerdy The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky. And to the right was Douglas Adams’ freaky Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
The legendry Minsky’s masterpiece was there because I had managed to get an improbable bargain for it at the Strand book fair. And it has been with me since. The Guide was travelling to spend some time with Krishna Kumar from work who has only read one of the four parts in the ‘trilogy’.
For Guide fans the most endearing character is, of course, Marvin, the paranoid android. Now I got wondering if Adams had named the android after AI guru Marvin Minsky.
Minsky is equally well known for his adventures with a robot at the MIT’s AI labs. Isn’t he?
As I was nearing office, I was getting really excited and completely convinced that this must be so. And I was kicking myself for how in all these years I never suspected it.
Then I asked the mother of all oracles: the Internet!
First I went straight off to the community site. And found nothing there.
Then I went the Guide’s home. Nothing there either.
And finally I went to the place where all finally go; to the place where we should have gone first and not finally: To the trusty Wikipedia. And there I found the answer…
- It was not 42
- There was a time when some nerd had claimed on Wikipedia that Marvin, the paranoid android, was indeed named after Minsky. But that is not true.
- Wikipedia now has a correction which reads...
…Marvin was *not* named after Marvin Minsky but was, according to Adams, originally named "Marshall" after a friend of his, name later arbitrarily changed to "Marvin" to protect his friend's identity and/or sound less like a cowboy…
What an anticlimax to an otherwise wonderful morning :-(
posted by Zaki at 5:14 pm
4 Comments:
sir, every word that drips from your celebrated keyboard touches some corresponding part of my correspondent's soul. i await your next post with great anticipation.
Yo Zaki, eat your heart out: I've actually met Marv Minsky, sort of spent a weekend with him at a cozy little conference.
Can't make this longer, I'[m on the road, but I'm thrilled to see what I did see and I will be back, plus blogroll you when I next get a chance.
I caught the name "Marvin Minsky-AI" in the friend-list of Richard Feynman and then had similar "Eureka" moment about the H2G2 connection. Fortunately, I was led by google to your blog and the momentary gleam vanished from my eyes when I found that Marvin was 'Marshall' :-)
Thanks for the info
Got the same idea because Minsky asked about how machines could experience sadness/pleasures. The way Douglas described the happiness circuit is just too centered on the mark to ignore a possible adoption, even admiration! I hoped Marvin=Minsky as well, haha. But the latter is not paranoid ar all, which is maybe an upside in this revelation.
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