Marvin Minsky Quotes

To solve the Cube, you need special skills and understanding. For example, pattern recognition is very important to solve the Cube.

In a dilemma, it is helpful to change any variable, then reexamine the problem.

A desperation to escape a problem is the wrong way. A passion to understand it is the right way

I think being a producer makes you a problem solver, so you kind of go, "Well there's a problem. What do we do? How do we solve it?"

When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.

All thought is a feat of association; having what's in front of you bring up something in your mind that you almost didn't know you knew

The best way to solve any problem is to remove its cause.

You jump right over anything in the past, and you don't analyze problems.

... sometimes when you are asked a question that is difficult, the mind doesn't stay silent if it doesn't have the answer. The mind produces something, and what it produces very characteristically is the answer to an easier but related question.

I learned a lot. I really did. Millennium is a state of mind. I always thought of Frank Black as the greatest chess player that could take random pieces of information and string them together into a scenario that was accurate. I never thought of him as a psychic at all. We need people like that.

Sometimes I do have something in my head. But, for me, I think it usually ends up being about considering all of the elements, and trying to understand the distance from where we are to where we want to go.

Every good mathematician should also be a good chess player and vice versa.

the best way to sharpen a knife is not to whet one side of it only. And neither can you solve a riddle by considering only one end of it.

If you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it.

Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.

A problem is a question you haven't yet answered to a level that has fulfilled you.

It's my opinion that, if Barack did want to solve the gang problem, number one would be to work with people from the inside out, people who can actually give him an accurate analysis of the problem in L.A., because they're in it or at one point were a part of it, and now they're workin' to change it, and redirect the energy and the focus of it. And then consciously take steps to solve the problem. But I don't feel like zero tolerance, strict laws, locking everybody up is a viable means to stop that problem.

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

I need to solve the problem. It's no different from how am I going to get my son out the door when he needs to go to school. It's a bigger version of that same type of problem.

In the army, all combat officers are taught the "Estimate of the Situation": When you are faced with a problem - take that hill, or in business maybe grow your market share - the first thing you do is to make an analysis of your environment.

It seems that we're better at finding someone to blame for our problems than we are at finding creative solutions to fix them.

New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few others bother to look.

One cannot come back too often to the question what is knowledge and to the answer knowledge is what one knows.... Knowledge is the thing you know and how can you know more than you do know.

Law Number XXXII: Hiring consultants to conduct studies can be an excellent means of turning problems into gold, your problems into their gold.

The best way to view a present problem is to give it all you've got, to study it and its nature, to perceive within it the intrinsic interrelationships, to discover the answer to the problem within the problem itself.