Abstract
Many of the questions addressed in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Brain Theory in fact have a long history. The aim of this chapter is to present briefly some of that history. Section 1, The Road to 1943, traces the story to 1943, which saw the publication of three remarkable papers: McCulloch and Pitts giving a logical theory of neural networks; Rosenbleuth, Wiener, and Bigelow asserting that a machine with feedback is imbued with purpose; while Craik saw the ability of the brain to simulate the world as providing the key to intelligence. Section 2, Cybernetics Defined and Dissolved, shows how Cybernetics emerged from these studies, only to give birth to a number of distinct new disciplines—such as AI, biological control theory, cognitive psychology, and neural modeling—which each went their separate ways, and shows how brain theory arose therefrom. Section 3 then charts the new rapprochement between AI and Brain Theory that gives new solutions to the cybernetic concerns of the 1940s and 1950s. We first note briefly the rap prochement among AI, cognitive psychology, and linguistics, which brought them together under the banner of cognitive science, and then see how the increasing concern of workers in AI and cognitive psychology with parallelism led to the development of the style known as “connectionism” or PDP (parallel distributed processing), which fosters the rapprochement with brain theory.
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Arbib, M.A. (1987). A Historical Perspective. In: Brains, Machines, and Mathematics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4782-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4782-1_1
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