[jarekr]

"How? Because people in the field of neural networks and AI would never claim that Minsky "pioneered neural networks". To the contrary (and as Minsky's wikipedia article – i'm sure the source of this claim – obliquely notes), Minsky's pessimism about the abilities of neural network computing lead to the abandonment of artificial neural networks as a major research topic."

That is a very confused description of what happened. Minsky is in fact a very important contributor to early neural networks theory and what you refer to as his "pessimism", is in fact his proof that a neural network can not be trained in any way to "learn" the exclusive-or logical function (among other things). This is one of the fundamental results in NN theory.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptrons_%28book%29

[kleiba]

his proof that a neural network can not be trained in any way to "learn" the exclusive-or logical function

What you mean is a neural network without hidden layers.