New Steps Towards the Artificial

Abstract

While denying the relevance of cybernetic robotics, Newell and Simon pointed out that, besides symbolic information-processing modeling, another, different line of research was being pursued at the time, which would use formal models that simulated the properties of neurons and of their organization into nets (Newell and Simon, 1963: 392). In fact, at the time of writing, this line of research was well established, and some of the events in its development were touched on in previous chapters. Rashevsky had tried, at the end of the 1920s and later in his 1938 Mathematical Biophysics, to analyze various physiological and neural phenomena mathematically. In 1943, McCulloch and Pitts introduced Boolean algebra to describe nets consisting of formal neurons. In 1949, in The Organization of Behavior, Hebb formulated his law on the modification of nerve connections during learning. Nets of formal neurons, with connections that could be modified through rules of this kind, have been simulated on computers since the early 1950s.