How did a 1958 invention called the Perceptron convince people that machines could learn like brains?
The New York Times proclaimed it would one day 'walk, talk, see, write, and reproduce itself.' It was a single neuron.
The answer
In 1958, psychologist Frank Rosenblatt at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory built the Mark I Perceptron, a hardware device designed to recognize visual patterns. It used a 20x20 grid of photocells (400 inputs) connected to a layer of association units, which fed into a single output neuron. The machine could learn to classify simple shapes by adjusting its connection weights through a training algorithm. The Navy funded the project, and the New York Times ran a front-page story claiming the device was 'the embryo of an electronic computer that the Navy expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.'
Source: IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
- perceptron
- neural-networks
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