Although neural networks had fallen from favor in the wake of Minsky’s book on the Perceptron, Hinton, then a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, had kept the faith, building the Boltzmann Machine in collaboration with a researcher named Terry Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. They were part of what one contemporary later called “the neural network underground.” The rest of the AI movement was focused on symbolic methods, including the Cyc project under way in Texas. Hinton and Sejnowski, in contrast, believed the future still lay in
...more
