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KF5JRV > TECH 17.06.16 13:37l 59 Lines 3524 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: First Pattern Recognition
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Pioneer Program in Pattern Recognition 1955
In "Self Pattern recognition and modern computers," Proceedings of the Western
Joint Computer Conference (1955) 91-93, English artificial intelligence
researcher Oliver Selfridge described one of the first attempts to
devise an optical character-reading program by teaching the computer to
extract the significant features of a given letter-pattern from a background
of irrelevant detail.
“This involved getting the machine to accept slightly different versions of
the same typed symbol as exactly that—different versions of the same symbol.
In attacking this problem Selfridge launched a project that continues to
absorb energy, the project of making machines recognize certain slightly
different configurations of elements as constituting the same pattern (or,
looking at it in another way, getting the machine to recognize the same
identities as the human being). Visual pattern recognition was Selfridge’s
particular concern, but, in its general form, pattern recognition is a
fundamental topic in almost all AI projectsö (Pratt, Thinking Machines. The
Evolution of Artificial Intelligence [1987] 204).Selfridge, a native of
England, matriculated at MIT at the age of fourteen. He published a paper on
neural nets in 1948 (Archives of the Institute of Cardiology of Mexico
[1948] and in 1955 organized with Marvin Minsky the first conference
on AI.
Selfridge, a native of England, matriculated at MIT at the age of fourteen. He
published a paper on neural nets in 1948 (Archives of the Institute of
Cardiology of Mexico [1948] and in 1955 organized with Marvin Minsky
the first summer conference on AI.
In an interview, "Oliver Selfridge—in from the start, IEEE Expert 11, no. 5
(1996) 15-17, Selfridge discussed his early involvement with artificial
intelligence:
"Q: How did you become interested in AI?
Oliver Selfridge: It was at MIT, a long time before the Dartmouth Conference,
and I was studying mathematics under Norbert Wiener. By luck, of which I’ve
had a great deal in my life, I was introduced to Walter Pitts, who was working
with Warren McCulloch on a topic they called theoretical neurophysiology. I
had studied logic, and through Walter, Warren, and Norbert got introduced to
neural nets at that time. I went to the Pacific at the end of World War II
with the United States Navy and came back to graduate school, again at MIT.
Norbert was then writing Cybernetics, and Walter and I were helping him with
various aspects of it. As I studied mathematics (my original field) and
interacted with Norbert, Warren, and Walter, I began to be interested in the
specific processing that neural nets could do and even more interested in the
general properties of learning.
At this point McCulloch and Pitts had written the first two AI papers
(although it wasn’t called that). The first showed that a neural net could
work out certain kinds of problems, such as pattern recognition in the general
cognitive sense, and the second discussed acquisition of patterns (how we know
“universalsö). These two works followed all the glorious mathematics that
Turing and Gödel had done in the twenties and thirties about computability and
Turing machines. This mathematics was, of course, the beginning of a formal
description of what computability meant. Johnny Von Neumann visited us at MIT
occasionally, so again by pure luck, before the age of twenty, I had been
introduced to McCulloch, Pitts, Wiener, and Von Neumann."
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