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Web of Stories has just released new footage of an interview with Marvin Minsky: Artificial Intelligence Pioneer, inventor of the confocal microscope, and co-founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (among other things).

I’ve chosen two short segments, but could easily have picked many others:  like his time as advisor on Stanley Kubric’s 2001, or his recounting of conversations with Richard Feynman and Francis Crick, but these two tasters should resonate with many scientists.

Here he describes how a chance discussion with John Nash enabled him to go on to prove one of his theorems

John Nash solves my PhD problem

And in this segment he tells us “why we should publish failures in AI research,”  which is particularly pertinent as well to biomedical research

Why we should publish failures in AI research

In 151 short chapters, you can hear Minsky further opine on such matters as why there’s no such thing as consciousness, the problem with perceptrons, thinking in threes, and making a robot that can put a pillow in a pillowcase. In one reflective segment he describes how he sees his life as just an “endless sequence of lucky breaks.”  I’m more inclined to believe, as Samuel Goldwin put it: “the harder I work, the luckier I get.”

More can be found at www.webofstories.com

Oh, and we’d be interested to hear of any serendipitous events that may have opened up new avenues for research or discovery for you, and we may even feature you talking about them on the F1000 channel of Web of Stories.