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Week 1: Steps Toward AI by Marvin Minsky. Available here [1]

A few comments to guide your reading.

Keep in mind first that this paper was written in 1961, 57 (fifty seven!) years ago. I suspect that’s likely before most of you had even entered middle school.

As the guest editor’s comment indicates, this is very early on in the birth of the modern version of the field; Minsky had been invited to write an tutorial overview.

As this is not a technical paper about an idea, technique or program, the standard format for writing about the paper doesn’t apply.

Recall your job is to summarize the paper in one page. Do that, and try to comment on these things as well:

a) how many of the ideas Minsky mentions do you recognize as still in use?

b) does he do a good job of laying out the structure of the field?

c) consider the sentence near the top of page 9 beginning “A compute can do, in a sense…” There are several reasons why he starts off that way. List some that seem compelling to you.