Marvin Minsky, a professor emeritus at MIT who pioneered the exploration of the mind and its replication in a computer, died Sunday from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 88, according to the MIT Media Lab.

In his prologue to his seminal book, Society of Mind, Minsky wrote that he tried to explain how the mind works, and “that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.”

In 1982, he wrote in a magazine article that, “it will be a long time before we learn enough about common sense reasoning to make machines as smart as people are.” While researchers know a lot about making specialized expert systems, the machines were not capable of improving themselves in interesting ways, he added.

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