Frank Rosenblatt was a New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 born computer scientist who completed the Perceptron

Perceptron

The perceptron is a type of artificial neural network invented in 1957 at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory by Frank Rosenblatt. It can be seen as the simplest kind of feedforward neural network: a linear classifier.- Definition :...

, or MARK 1

Mark 1

Mark 1 is the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark of the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It begins "The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God" stating right from the start Mark's belief. However, because there is no article in the Koine Greek some have suggested be...

, computer at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 in 1960. This was the first computer

Computer

A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

 that could learn new skills by trial and error, using a type of neural network

Neural network

The term neural network was traditionally used to refer to a network or circuit of biological neurons. The modern usage of the term often refers to artificial neural networks, which are composed of artificial neurons or nodes...

 that simulates human thought processes.

Rosenblatt’s perceptrons were initially simulated on an IBM 704

IBM 704

The IBM 704, the first mass-produced computer with floating point arithmetic hardware, was introduced by IBM in 1954. The 704 was significantly improved over the IBM 701 in terms of architecture as well as implementations which were not compatible with its predecessor.Changes from the 701 included...

 computer at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory

Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory

Calspan Corporation is a science and technology company originally founded in 1943 as part of the Research Laboratory of the Curtiss-Wright Airplane Division at Buffalo, New York. Calspan consists of 5 divisions: Flight Research, Transonic Wind Tunnel, Systems Engineering, Transportation Sciences...

 in 1957. By the study of neural networks such as the Perceptron, Rosenblatt hoped that "the fundamental laws of organization which are common to all information handling systems, machines and men included, may eventually be understood."

A 1946 graduate of the Bronx High School of Science

Bronx High School of Science

The Bronx High School of Science is a specialized New York City public high school often considered the premier science magnet school in the United States. Founded in 1938, it is now located in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx...

, Rosenblatt was a colorful character at Cornell in the early 1960s. A handsome bachelor, he drove a classic MGA sports car and was often seen with his cat named Tobermory. He enjoyed mixing with undergraduates, and for several years taught an interdisciplinary undergraduate honors course entitled "Theory of Brain Mechanisms" that drew students equally from Cornell's Engineering and Liberal Arts colleges.

This course was a melange of ideas drawn from a huge variety of sources: results from experimental brain surgery on epileptic patients while conscious, experiments on measuring the activity of individual neurons in the visual cortex of cats, studies of loss of particular kinds of mental function as a result of trauma

Physical trauma

Trauma refers to "a body wound or shock produced by sudden physical injury, as from violence or accident." It can also be described as "a physical wound or injury, such as a fracture or blow." Major trauma can result in secondary complications such as circulatory shock, respiratory failure and death...

 to specific areas of the brain

Brain

The brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals—only a few primitive invertebrates such as sponges, jellyfish, sea squirts and starfishes do not have one. It is located in the head, usually close to primary sensory apparatus such as vision, hearing,...

, and various analog and digital electronic circuits that modeled various details of neuronal behavior (i.e. the perceptron itself, as a machine).

There were also some breathtaking speculations, based on what was known about brain behavior at this time (well before the CAT or PET

Positron emission tomography

Positron emission tomography is nuclear medicine imaging technique that produces a three-dimensional image or picture of functional processes in the body. The system detects pairs of gamma rays emitted indirectly by a positron-emitting radionuclide , which is introduced into the body on a...

 scan was available), including one calculation that, based on the number of neuronal connections in a human brain, the human cortex had enough storage space to hold a complete "photographic" record of its perceptual inputs, stored at the 16 frames-per-second rate of flicker fusion, for about two hundred years.

In 1962 Rosenblatt published much of the content of this honors course in the book "Principles of neurodynamics: Perceptrons and the theory of brain mechanisms" (Spartan Books, 1962) which he used thereafter as a textbook for the course.

Research on similar devices was also being done in other places such as SRI

SRI International

SRI International , founded as Stanford Research Institute, is one of the world's largest contract research institutes. Based in Menlo Park, California, the trustees of Stanford University established it in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in the region. It was later...

, and many researchers had big expectations on what they could do. The initial excitement became somewhat reduced, though, when in 1969 Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky

Marvin Lee Minsky is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence , co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.-Biography:...

 and Seymour Papert

Seymour Papert

Seymour Papert is an MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and educator. He is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, as well as an inventor of the Logo programming language....

 published the book Perceptrons

Perceptrons (book)

Perceptrons: an introduction to computational geometry is a book authored by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, published in 1969. An edition with handwritten corrections and additions was released in the early 1970s...

with mathematical proofs that elucidated some of the characteristics of the three-layer feed-forward perceptrons. For one side, they demonstrated some of the advantages of using them on certain cases. But they also presented some limitations. The most important one was the impossibility of implementing general functions using only "local" neurons, that don't have all inputs available. This was taken by many people as one of the most important characteristics of perceptrons.

Rosenblatt died in a boating incident in 1971. He is buried at Quick Cemetery in Brooktondale, New York. After research on neural networks returned to the mainstream in the 1980s, new researchers started to study his work again. This new wave of study on neural networks is interpreted by some researchers as being a contradiction of hypotheses presented in the book Perceptrons, and a confirmation of Rosenblatt's expectations, but the extent of this is questioned by some.

In 2004 the IEEE established the Frank Rosenblatt Award, for "outstanding contributions to the advancement of the design, practice, techniques or theory in biologically and linguistically motivated computational paradigms including but not limited to neural networks, connectionist systems, evolutionary computation, fuzzy systems, and hybrid intelligent systems in which these paradigms are contained."

See also

• Artificial neural networks
• History of artificial intelligence
• AI Winter
• Perceptrons