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Is this post card from the past or is this a post card from the future? A fascinating and often overlooked chapter in AI history. Kunihiko Fukushima and his Neocognitron, a pioneering artificial “brain” was developed in 1979. That laid the foundation for today’s deep learning. The “Artificial Brain” (Neocognitron): Created by Kunihiko Fukushima in 1979, it was the world’s first multilayer convolutional neural network. This architecture is now the backbone of modern AI vision systems. The Biological Approach: Unlike most Western AI at the time, Fukushima’s goal was to simulate the brain to understand human vision. The 1970s Context: He conducted this research during the so-called “AI winter” at NHK’s Science & Technical Research Laboratories. The WABOT-1 Connection There was an actual robot rather than just a brain model. WABOT-1, the world’s first full-scale humanoid robot, built in 1973 at Waseda University. It had a limb-control system, vision system, and conversation system, and was estimated to have the mental faculty of a one-and-a-half-year-old child. ...

(Image source: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/2008-09/tony-hoare/images/hoare%20main.jpg ) In case you like code more than prose about the code, here is the code. That is vibed C. Quality is average, bordering on bad. I spent some time, in between other tasks, and made what is I might claim, elegant, human optimised C code. ( https://godbolt.org/z/9M8oj34TT ) Those improvements need never stop, of course. The Foundation Everyone Forgot — Almost Before Simula 67. Before Smalltalk. Before anyone had coined the term object-oriented programming. Tony Hoare formalized the concept of the discriminated union in his seminal 1965 paper, “Record Handling.” ...