Frank Rosenblatt, a psychologist at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, unveiled the Mark I Perceptron: a machine that learned from examples instead of following instructions. Its eye was a 20x20 grid of 400 photocells. Its weights were potentiometers, wired up at random and physically turned by electric motors as it trained.
📰 On 8 July 1958 The New York Times ran it under the headline "New Navy Device Learns By Doing", and reported the expectation that such machines would eventually walk, talk, see, write, reproduce themselves and be conscious of their existence.
What the machine could actually do at the time was tell cards marked on the left from cards marked on the right.
❄️ Then in 1969 Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert published Perceptrons, pointing out that a single-layer network cannot even learn XOR. Funding drained away, and neural networks spent most of two decades in the wilderness before backpropagation dragged them back out.
Sixty-eight years on, the hardware is unrecognisable and the press releases are word for word the same 🗞
Next Move AI | #Facts
