Connectionists: Scientific Integrity, the 2021 Turing Lecture, etc.

[Barak A. Pearlmutter]

Jürgen,

It's fantastic that you're helping expose people to some important bits of
scientific literature.

But...

> Minsky & Papert [M69] made some people think that Rosenblatt [R58-62] had
only linear NNs plus threshold functions

If you actually read Minsk and Papert's "Perceptrons" book, this is not a
misconception it encourages. It defines a "k-th order perceptron" as a
linear threshold unit preceded by an arbitrary set of fixed nonlinearities
with fan-in k. (A linear threshold unit with binary inputs would, in this
terminology, be a 1st-order perceptron.) All their theorems are for k>1.
For instance, they prove that a k-th order perceptron cannot do (k+1)-bit
parity, which in the special case of k=1 simplifies to the trivial
observation that a simple linear threshold unit cannot do xor.
[image: perceptrons-book-cover-1.jpg] [image: perceptron-diagram-1.jpg]
This is why you're not supposed to directly cite things you have not
actually read: it's too easy to misconstrue them based on inaccurate
summaries transmitted over a series of biased noisy compressive channels.

Cheers,

--Barak.
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