thomblake comments on The "Outside the Box" Box - Less Wrong

33 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 October 2007 10:50PM

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Comment author: thomblake 08 February 2010 08:09:23PM 0 points [-]

This cached thought has been around for three decades. Still no general intelligence. But, somehow, everyone outside the field knows that neural networks are the Dominant-Paradigm-Overthrowing New Idea, ever since backpropagation was invented in the 1970s.

It's been going strong in one form or another since the late nineteenth century. William James was a notable supporter of the notion that the human brain had emergent behavior based on the interaction of many simple units, and from this culture came the term "connectionism" that was popular amongst AI speculators Before the War.