Patrick Winston

"I was operating as a person intrigued by mechanism rather than concerned with the task, concerned with the problem and the need to bring a solution to the problem"

"Like many students in the intervening years, I was obsessed by this new representational idea and looking for a place to apply it, rather than the other way around - facing the problem and bringing the right tools to bear on it."

"In any event I was speculating on the use of semantic nets in a blocks world context and a very obscure footnote in my thesis proposal said, "Well, gee, if I can describe block structures as semantic nets, then perhaps I could gain something from the differences between two descriptions of different scenes and their semantic net form and that might be a basis for learning something." And maybe I gave an example or something."

"I should refine my notion of how difficult to approach... Minsky has never been difficult to approach. He just seemed that way because anybody sufficiently famous will seem difficult to approach to a shy graduate student. I'm still awed by Minsky. In a sense, nothing's changed."