[mindcrime]

If a book or movie is ever made about the history of AI, the script would include this period of AI history and would probably go something like this…

I would love to see a "Halt and Catch Fire" style treatment of this era.

Marvin Minsky, a jealous academic peer of Frank, was in favor of a different approach to AI: Expert Systems. He published a book (Perceptrons, 1969) which all but killed research into neural nets. Marvin pointed out that no neural net with a depth of one layer could solve the "XOR" problem.

I think a lot of people have an impression - an impression that I shared until recently - that the Perceptrons book was a "hit piece" aimed at intentionally destroying interest in the perceptron approach. But having just finished reading the Parallel Distributed Processing book and being in the middle of reading Perceptrons right now, I no longer fully buy that. Now the effect may well have been what is widely known. But Minsky and Papert don't really seem to be as "anti-perceptron" as the "received wisdom" suggests.