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

[Rothganger, Fred]

The McCulloch & Pitts paper referenced below leads with "Because of the 'all-or-none' character of nervous activity ...". This elevates spike events to be the most important feature of neural systems, then builds a whole theory around it. This is not consistent with modern neuroscience, and even overlooks things the authors themselves mention.

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From: Connectionists <connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu> on behalf of Gary Marcus <gary.marcus at nyu.edu>
Sent: Saturday, February 17, 2024 6:42 PM
To: poole <poole at cs.ubc.ca>
Cc: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu <connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Connectionists: Early history of symbolic and neural network approaches to AI

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>
[cid:cddedc31-0571-40ff-99b2-a18ac7153c2a]<https://web.archive.org/web/20070826230310/http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html>


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


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