Frank Rosenblatt

Frank Rosenblatt

An American psychologist and computer scientist who built the Perceptron in 1958, an early artificial neural network capable of learning to classify simple patterns, and the first practical realisation of the ideas set out by McCulloch and Pitts. The perceptron's limitations, highlighted by Minsky and Papert's 1969 critique, contributed to a funding downturn for neural network research, but Rosenblatt's basic architecture is a direct ancestor of the neural networks used throughout modern AI. (See also: Marvin Minsky, Neural network)