Frank Rosenblatt - Neurodynamics

Neurodynamics

There were also some breathtaking speculations, based on what was known about brain behavior at this time (well before the CAT or PET 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, and many researchers had big expectations on what they could do. The initial excitement became somewhat reduced, though, when in 1969 Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert published the book Perceptrons 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.