Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!lll-winken!tristan!loren
From: loren@tristan.llnl.gov (Loren Petrich)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: What Has Traditional AI Accomplished?
Message-ID: <69929@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Date: 18 Oct 90 23:34:28 GMT
References: <69609@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <1990Oct15.143325.26044@unislc.uucp> <1990Oct16.135631.6444@cbnewsj.att.com>
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In article <1990Oct16.135631.6444@cbnewsj.att.com> jwi@cbnewsj.att.com (Jim Winer @ AT&T, Middletown, NJ) writes:
>
>I worked on the Mark I Perceptron (Rosenblatt model) in 1959 
>at Cornel Aeronautical Laboratories, Inc. (defunct) under contract
>to Office of Naval Research (ONR). That makes the field at least
>30 years old. Neural Nets have been inconvenient to work with until 
>recently when specialized hardware has become available.

	Specialized hardware?????

	Even that is still only in the experimental stage.

	Most Neural Nets now exist only in software form for the
traditional brand of computer. And it is on such software Neural Nets
that designs of hardware Neural Nets will ultimately depend -- it is
much easier to rewrite a program than to design a new chip. And even a
Neural Net chip would need to be controlled by such a computer.

	The simplicity of the basic algorithms keep making me wonder
why NN's did not take off earlier -- the basic code for one takes up
only a couple pages of Fortran or C. Try writing one yourself. I guess
that (in)famous book by Minsky and Papert, _Perceptrons_, with its
seemingly airtight theoretical arguments, is what had squelched the
field for so long.

	I wonder what the fellow who had worked on the Rosenblatt Mark
I Perceptron has to say about this question. What does he have to say
about the work of Minsky and Papert?


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