Seymour Papert
In plain wordsA South African-born mathematician who co-wrote 'Perceptrons', a critique of early neural networks, with Marvin Minsky, and invented the children's programming language Logo.
MIT mathematician and educator, born in South Africa, whose work spanned machine perception and how children learn. After working with the psychologist Jean Piaget in Geneva (1958–1963), he joined MIT, where he co-directed the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky, prop. n.: An American AI pioneer who helped launch the field and MIT's AI laboratory, co-wrote a famous critique of early neural networks, and pictured the mind as a society of many simple parts.. His 1966 memo 'The Summer Vision Project', which set students to build substantial parts of a visual recognition system in a single summer, later became a byword for underestimating perception (see Moravec's paradoxMoravec's paradox, n.: The observation that what is hard for people, like chess or algebra, is often easy for computers, while what toddlers do effortlessly, such as seeing, walking and picking things up, is very hard for machines.). With Minsky he wrote 'PerceptronsPerceptrons (book), prop. n.: A 1969 book by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert proving that simple one-layer neural networks cannot learn certain patterns. It is widely blamed for a decade-long slump in neural-network research.' (1969), whose proofs that limited perceptronsperceptron, n.: One of the first learning machines: a single artificial neuron that sorts inputs into two groups by drawing a straight dividing line, nudging its weights whenever it guesses wrong. cannot compute properties such as parity or connectedness contributed to a decline in neural-network research. With Wally Feurzeig and Cynthia Solomon he created the Logo programming language (1967), and his book 'Mindstorms' (1980) launched constructionism, the view that children learn best by building things, including programs. He was a founding faculty member of the MIT Media Lab (1985).
Related
- Perceptrons (book)Perceptrons (book), prop. n.: A 1969 book by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert proving that simple one-layer neural networks cannot learn certain patterns. It is widely blamed for a decade-long slump in neural-network research.
- Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky, prop. n.: An American AI pioneer who helped launch the field and MIT's AI laboratory, co-wrote a famous critique of early neural networks, and pictured the mind as a society of many simple parts.
- perceptronperceptron, n.: One of the first learning machines: a single artificial neuron that sorts inputs into two groups by drawing a straight dividing line, nudging its weights whenever it guesses wrong.
- Moravec's paradoxMoravec's paradox, n.: The observation that what is hard for people, like chess or algebra, is often easy for computers, while what toddlers do effortlessly, such as seeing, walking and picking things up, is very hard for machines.
- computer visioncomputer vision, n.: The part of AI that lets computers make sense of images and video: recognizing faces, reading signs, spotting tumors on scans or judging how far away a car is.
- Frank RosenblattFrank Rosenblatt, prop. n.: An American psychologist who invented the perceptron, the first neural network that learned from examples, and built a machine that learned to recognize simple images.
Sources
- Papert, S. (1966). The Summer Vision Project. MIT AI Memo 100.
- Minsky, M. & Papert, S. (1969). Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry. MIT Press.
- Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. Basic Books.
Mentioned in
microworldmicroworld, n.: A small, deliberately simplified artificial setting, such as a table of toy blocks, in which an AI program can be tested in full detail before anyone tries it in the messy real world.