US scientist Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the development of artificial intelligence, has died, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says.
The MIT professor emeritus died of a stroke on the weekend in a Boston hospital. He was 88.
The New York-born Minsky received numerous international awards for his AI work and mentoring activities, including the Turing Award, the highest honour bestowed in the information sciences, in 1969.
He was the co-founder of MIT's AI laboratory and author of the influential books The Society of Mind and The Emotion Machine.
He joined MIT's information science and electrical engineering department in 1958 and helped found the prestigious school's AI lab a year later.
Minsky explored how to provide machines with a sense of perception and intelligence similar to that of humans, he created robotic hands that could manipulate objects, developed new programming frameworks and wrote extensively on philosophical matters linked to AI.
He was convinced that man will one day develop machines that will compete with human intelligence.
In 1985, Minsky became a founding member of MIT's Media Laboratory, where he taught and engaged in mentoring until shortly before his death.
He published his last book in 2006 under the title "The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind."
Minsky studied at Harvard University after serving in the US Navy during World War II. After graduating, he attended Princeton, where he obtained his PhD in mathematics four years later.
He built his first neuronal simulation network during his first year at Princeton.
