Connectionists: Early history of symbolic and neural network approaches to AI

[David H Kirshner]

My assumption that the Turing test was based on the possibility of symbolic AI stems from my understanding of the Universal Turing Machine which I’ve always taken to be foundational to symbolic processing. But I don’t know for sure that Turing’s scope wasn’t larger than symbolic processing.
David

From: Gary Marcus <gary.marcus at nyu.edu>
Sent: Saturday, February 17, 2024 7:43 PM
To: poole <poole at cs.ubc.ca>
Cc: David H Kirshner <dkirsh at lsu.edu>; Iam Palatnik <iam.palat at gmail.com>; connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu
Subject: Early history of symbolic and neural network approaches to AI

You don't often get email from gary.marcus at nyu.edu<mailto:gary.marcus at nyu.edu>. Learn why this is important<https://aka.ms/LearnAboutSenderIdentification>
adding some pointers to David’s remarks: McCulloch and Pitts in 1943 were very much trying to bridge the symbolic and neural world. It’s clear even in the abstract (article below). Tensions between symbolic and neural approaches were in full force by Minsky and Papert 1969, and resurfaced in the 1980s.

I don’t have a clear sense of where things were in Turing’s time per se, but both approaches were countenanced in the 1955 proposal for the Dartmouth conference link below; Rosenblatt had gathered steam by 1958 as noted.

A PROPOSAL FOR THE DARTMOUTH SUMMER RESEARCH PROJECT ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE<https://web.archive.org/web/20070826230310/http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html>
web.archive.org<https://web.archive.org/web/20070826230310/http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html>
[X]<https://web.archive.org/web/20070826230310/http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html>


[preview.png]
mccolloch.logical.calculus.ideas.1943<https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/mccolloch.logical.calculus.ideas.1943.pdf>
PDF Document · 1 MB<https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/mccolloch.logical.calculus.ideas.1943.pdf>



On Feb 17, 2024, at 4:40 PM, poole <poole at cs.ubc.ca<mailto:poole at cs.ubc.ca>> wrote:


On Feb 17, 2024, at 1:08 PM, David H Kirshner <dkirsh at lsu.edu<mailto:dkirsh at lsu.edu>> wrote:

[CAUTION: Non-UBC Email]
You’re right, David.
I should have said “Back in Alan Turing’s time when the possibility of AI meant the possibility of symbolic AI, ….”

In Turing's time, from what I can see (I wan’t alive then ;^) neural networks were more trendy than symbolic approaches. Turing’s paper was 1950. McCulloch and Pitts seminal work was 1943. Minsky’s thesis on neural networks was written in 1952. (Schmidhuber has great resources on the history of NNs and AI on his website).

There was lots of neural network hype in the 1950’s:

"The Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence. …The service said it would …build the first of its Perceptron thinking machines that will be able to read and write. It is expected to be finished in about a year at a cost of $100,000."
– New York Times [1958]

It was later in the 1950’s that they came to realize that AI needed representations, lead by Minsky and McCarthy, whick lead to the rise of symbolic approaches.. (It is interesting that a major NN conference ICLR is about representations).

I am sure there are people who know the history better than me, who might like to provide more persoective.

David



——
David Poole,
Department of Computer Science,
University of British Columbia,
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__cs.ubc.ca_-7Epoole&d=DwIFaQ&c=slrrB7dE8n7gBJbeO0g-IQ&r=wQR1NePCSj6dOGDD0r6B5Kn1fcNaTMg7tARe7TdEDqQ&m=GaLFSysAmNesHoiuLMLNQzFZKcQfTn2lkEhxM8Xrc205FjMs-5qx1lSBZ4u9kagl&s=XFNzK3B_BUrmI0gbNaacNriRQ53tTCzjlNaL2JBAmRg&e=
poole at cs.ubc.ca<mailto:poole at cs.ubc.ca>

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