Artificial Intelligence writes an Obituary for Marvin Minsky

We Asked a Robot to Write an Obit for AI Pioneer Marvin Minsky

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Marvin Minsky wearing an interactive glove in the MIT robotics lab in the early 1980s. Dan McCoy/Rainbow/RGB Ventures/SuperStock/Alamy

The pioneering artificial intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky died Sunday. So we thought it would be appropriate to ask for an obituary from one of his virtual descendants: Wordsmith, the automated news-writing bot from the company Automated Insights.
Yes, sure, it’s only a near-analogy. Wordsmith isn’t exactly an AI. It takes structured data—stuff that fits into a spreadsheet—and fits it into templates of increasing complexity. But Minsky was always interested in the differences and similarities between human and machine cognition, and arguably Wordsmith is cogitating every bit as hard as human reporters do on deadline. (Trust me on this.) “A lot of what goes into a typical obit is very structured, or at least structurable,” says James Kotecki, head of communications at Automated Insights. “You can start with things like their name, their age, the day the died, how they died. You can imagine in a spreadsheet, ‘significant accomplishments 1, 2, and 3.’”
So in this case, the template is a one-off rather than fully automated, and the data was harder to scrape. (But Kotecki says the company has been working on automating obituaries for a while.)
In the golden age of newspapers, obituary writers were often masters of craft. You can see that even now—the New York Times obit for Minsky, written by Glenn Rifkin, is lean and well-reported. Here’s a bit:

Intellectually restless throughout his life, Professor Minsky sought to move on from mathematics once he had earned his doctorate. After ruling out genetics as interesting but not profound, and physics as mildly enticing, he chose to focus on intelligence itself.

Nice, right? Wordsmith can’t match that, but it’s not supposed to. “The point would not be to replace a touching human obituary, but it might be a situation where you wanted to be the first media company out when someone notable dies,” Kotecki says. “You could have an automated version come out quickly and have human writers write details around it.”
Human-machine collaboration? Seems like Minsky would have approved.
Here’s what the machine came up with:

Marvin Lee Minsky, 88, passed away January 24, 2016 in Boston, Massachusetts of cerebral hemorrhaging.
Born August 9, 1927 in New York City, New York, to parents Fannie Reiser and Henry Minsky, Marvin Minsky was known for his pioneer contribution to the field of artificial intelligence (AI). After graduating from Phillips Academy, Minsky attended Harvard University, graduating with a BA in Mathematics in 1950. He continued his education at Princeton University, ultimately graduating with a a PhD in Mathematics in 1954.
Some of Minsky’s greatest accomplishments include founding the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1959 and authoring many groundbreaking books in the field of artificial intelligence, including Perceptrons. He won many notable awards in his field of study, including the Turing Award in 1969.
Minsky is survived by his wife Gloria Minsky; three children, Margaret Minsky, Julie Minsky, and Henry Minsky.
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http://www.wired.com/2016/01/we-asked-a-robot-to-write-an-obit-for-ai-pioneer-marvin-minsky/?google_editors_picks=true