How Marvin Minsky Inspired Artificial Neural Networks
Dr. Paul Werbos calls it “a soap opera you wouldn’t believe”: the story of how a young Werbos was inspired by the pioneering computer scientist to pursue the development of artificial neural networks, and how Minsky later could not support the effort for disbelief that there was a solution to its many problems.
In this week’s podcast, Dr. Robert J. Marks interviewed Dr. Paul Werbos, famous for his 1974 dissertation which proposed training artificial neural networks through the use of a backpropagation of errors. The two discuss Werbos’s journey in the development of artificial neural networks and the role Marvin Minsky played throughout.
Robert J. Marks: Could we start, could you give a high level nutshell overview of your algorithm, error backpropagation, which is the dominant 99.9% of the time used as the algorithm for training artificial neural networks?
Paul Werbos: So backpropagation really came from me trying to understand how brains work and how you could build a brain like a brain. And when I was growing up, I read a lot of books I was excited by. There’s a book called Computers and Thought, which was the start of the whole artificial intelligence world. And believe it or not, I was inspired by a chapter by Marvin Minsky who said we could build human-like intelligence by using something he called reinforcement learning. And I said, “Wow. It would be nice to build something that can do it.”
