---
title: "Marvin Minsky"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Marvin Minsky"
aliases: ["Minsky"]
first_seen: "2026-05-31T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
connects_to: ["perceptrons (1969 book)","connectionism","credit assignment","Seymour Papert","AI winter"]
---


Co-author (with Papert) of *Perceptrons* (1969), the book at the center of
the vault's most-worked myth: that it "killed connectionism." The vault's
reading is narrower — the sterility of multilayer perceptrons was stated as a
*conjecture*, and the credit-assignment discussion often attributed to the
1969 edition actually appears only in the 1988 epilogue. Minsky is also the
usual (mis)attributed origin of the term "structural credit assignment,"
which the vault traces elsewhere.

## References
- [[myth-perceptrons-book-killed-connectionism]] · [[claim-perceptrons-multilayer-sterile-was-conjecture]] · [[claim-perceptrons-credit-assignment-only-in-1988-epilogue]] · [[myth-structural-credit-assignment-from-minsky-1961]]
- Captures: 2026-07-09-who-first-used-the-term-structural-credit-assignment, 2026-07-11-hop-papert-piaget-ai-bridge