Lesson 3 of 81958–19737 min
The perceptron and the first AI winter
In July 1958 the US Office of Naval Research unveiled an invention by Frank Rosenblatt, a research psychologist at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo, New York. Running on an IBM 704, it was shown cards marked on the left or on the right. After 50 trials it could tell them apart. Nobody had written a rule for it; it had learned.
The press went further than the demonstration. A New York Times headline announced a “new Navy device” that “learns by doing”, and The New Yorker called the perceptron the first serious rival to the human brain. The expectations set that summer would take a long time to pay back.
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Sources
- The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in the Brain (F. Rosenblatt, Psychological Review 65(6), 1958) — Psychological Review (copy hosted by the University of Illinois Chicago)
- Professor's perceptron paved the way for AI – 60 years too soon — Cornell Chronicle, Cornell University
- Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey (Sir James Lighthill, 1973) — AIAI, University of Edinburgh