Talk:Frank Rosenblatt
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More biographical information needed, if available.
This article contains a lot of errors. Minsky is at MIT, not Carnegie-Mellon University.
(This error checked and Minsky's location corrected to MIT on 5/31/06)
And the descriptions of Minsky's work on perceptrons are highly inaccurate.
(See: "History of the Perceptron" http://www.csulb.edu/~cwallis/artificialn/History.htm which briefly documents the Rosenblatt-Minsky dispute over perceptrons and the effect of Minsky and Papert's 1969 book "Perceptrons". The 1969 first edition of "Perceptrons" made the false claim that the severe computational limitations Minsky found in simple 3-layer perceptrons would also apply to any arbitrary higher-layer-count perceptron (i.e. essentially to any neural net) -- a claim Minsky later retracted in the 1980's, after his 1969 original mistake had killed essentially all research into neural nets for a decade.)
This makes me doubt the accuracy of the rest of the article.
I'm glad that you corrected CMU to MIT. But whoever is writing this article, you should read the Minsky book on Perceptrons, instead of quoting some web page which is ridiculously wrong. What are your sources for the rest of the information in this article? How can I believe any of it now?
This article is an absurd and inappropriate character attack on Minsky, which should in my opinion be removed. I agree with those above - it contains a lot of errors.
[edit] A couple of additional observations
I took Rosenblatt's course in 1965-66 (or maybe 1966-67--who can remember such things?). Rosenblatt may never have responded publicly to Minsky, but he had some colorful things to say in class.
He told us that he and Minsky were high school classmates (Bronx Science, IIRC). This could presumably be verified. He also said that they remained personal friends although they bitterly disagreed about the best way to model the brain. Rosenblatt sought to build crude analogs of brain circuits. He was a student of brain anatomy and ran a lab at Cornell that conducted numerous experiments on spinal cats (cats whose spinal cords were severed below the neck). A lot of our course readings were in neuroanatomy. He was dismissive of Minsky's black box approach to artificial intelligence (as long as the results of some deterministic computer program somehow resembled human behavior, the program was therefore a good model of the way the brain works) and really didn't think there was any long-term value to Minsky's work. He considered Minsky a lesser intellect and chalked his behavior up to jealousy.
Rosenblatt, as the article says, was a colorful character. But he was not well-liked by faculty. Part of the reason was his extraordinary brilliance (the first person who ever made me feel like a plodding dolt in comparison). For example, he had worked out and patented some device that is used on the end of a telescope to do some sort of filtering (details are lost in the fog bank of my memory, but, again, this is something that could be researched at USPTO). Astronomers had been trying to develop such a device for some time and thus the astronomy department were alleged to be angry that this guy from another field entirely had beaten them to it.
It should be mentioned that Rosenblatt's partner in the Perceptron (the cover article in the August 1960(?) Scientific American, by the way), was Ernest Bloch (not sure I have that right, but I'm close--check the Scientific American archive to get the name right), of Cornell's electrical engineering faculty, who taught a complementary course to Rosenblatt's.
Dmargulis 15:53, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
