Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

The story to be told today has two men, one of whom is a genius, and the other is also a genius.

The first genius was Walter Pitts, born in Detroit's poor neighborhood in 1925. Pitts's father, a boiler worker who likes to talk with his fists, obviously doesn't care about cultivating a genius at all. He just wants Pitts to drop out of school and earn money.

To make matters worse, Pitts has to face bullying neighbor children, and Pitts often hides in the community library to avoid being beaten.

Walter Walter Pitts Photo Source: https://www.newscientist.com

The library may be to Pitts what Hogwarts is to Harry Potter. There are no fierce dads or bossy neighbors, only all kinds of magical magic-knowledge.

The young Pitts taught himself Greek and Latin in the library, and the "dark magic" that fascinated him most was mathematics and logic.

At the age of 12, Pitts spent three days reading three volumes of principles of Mathematics, co-authored by Bertrand Russell and Alfred Alfred Whitehead. After reading it, the child picked out some mistakes and wrote a letter to Russell himself.

Russell answered the letter.

He not only replied to the letter, but also invited Pitts to come to Cambridge to study as a graduate student-before Pitts was in high school.

Due to family reasons, Pitts failed to go to Cambridge to become Russell's student, but Russell's reply prompted Pitts to become a mathematician and logician.

At the age of 15, Pitts learned that Russell had visited the University of Chicago and chose to leave his "home" forever and go to Chicago alone to find his own world.

"Zhipiao" Pitts has no high school diploma, no student status, and makes a living by taking a part-time job, but these can neither obliterate his determination to pursue scholarship, nor hide his dazzling halo of genius.

For example, at the age of 15, he walked straight into the office of the famous philosopher Rudolph Karnapp, without any self-introduction, took a copy of Karnapp's Philosophy and Logical Syntax, and said bluntly, "here, let me tell you where you wrote it wrong." With that, he walked away. Let poor Professor Karnapp run around the University of Chicago for dozens of days in order to find the "logical newsboy".

At the age of 18, Pitts met neuroscientist Warren McCarlock (Warren McCulloch). At that time, McCulloch was thinking about how neurons work. As a neuroscientist, he is very dismissive of psychologist Freud. He believes that explaining how neurons work is the correct solution to understanding cognition.

The timely appearance of mathematical and logical genius Pitts gave McCulloch the strongest boost. Pitts abstracted McCulloch's neural network into a mathematical model, proposed a functional model of threshold logic unit (threshold logic units,TLU) to describe neurons, and used a circular neural network structure to describe the formation of brain memory.

This is the famous Mmurp paper "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity". This paper is of groundbreaking significance to artificial neural network and artificial intelligence technology. TLU, also known as Mmurp neuron model, has been used up to now, laying the foundation for future deep learning technology.

However, this article did not cause much sensation at that time, a considerable part of the audience of the paper is neuroscientists, they do not fully understand the mathematical model, and this model is still much simpler than the human brain.

It was not until another genius, Norbert Norbert Wiener, appeared that he fully realized the potential of the McCulloch-Pitts model.

Wiener's nature of genius has been fully revealed since childhood. He entered high school at the age of 9, graduated from high school at 11 and went to Tufts University, earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics at 14 and a doctorate in mathematics from Harvard at 17-Wiener is by far the youngest PhD in Harvard history and has been hailed as "the most amazing boy in the world" (the Most Remarkable Boy in the world).

Wiener was once known as "the most amazing boy in the world". Photo Source: history-computer.com

After graduating with his PhD, Wiener went to Cambridge in England and Gottingen in Germany to further his studies. After returning to the United States, he taught at several universities and eventually took root at MIT, studying mathematics, information theory and control theory.

Wiener gradually became a great mentor in information theory, but for a while he was troubled by not being able to recruit the students he liked. Just then, someone recommended Pitts, a genius who taught himself math, logic, Greek and Latin and was appreciated by Russell and Karnapp.

At first, Wiener didn't believe in such people at all. But it turned out that he was wrong.

Wiener and Pitts first met in Wiener MIT's office. Both left out the pleasantries and got straight to the point. Wiener led Pitts to the blackboard and began to push the formula on the blackboard, and Pitts naturally put forward some of his own opinions in the process of Wiener's derivation.

Wiener sitting in the office. Photo Source: history-computer.com

After deducing the formula of the two blackboards, Wiener decided to keep Pitts.

Pitts was undoubtedly the most powerful young man Wiener had ever seen, and he thought Pitts would far surpass his peers and become one of the two or three most important scientists in the United States and the world at that time.

Under Wiener's protection, MIT made an exception and admitted Pitts, who had neither a high school degree nor a bachelor's degree.

As a result, Pitts officially became a doctoral student of Wiener and continued to study the neural model.

Under the guidance of Wiener, Pitts plans to expand his original two-dimensional plane neural network model into a three-dimensional model during his doctorate, and replace the original fixed function model with a probability model-and probability is Wiener's strength.

Even today, a three-dimensional neural network model based on probability is not an ordinary doctoral project, let alone 70 years ago! Everyone thought that the mathematical complexity of the three-dimensional neural network was unimaginable, but everyone-- especially Wiener-- had confidence in Pitts.

In addition, Wiener, the information theory mogul, sees another possibility in the McCulloch-Pitts model. McCulloch-Pitts uses neurology as a starting point, hoping to model neurons to understand how the brain works. But Wiener believes that since this mathematical model can be used to describe the brain, in turn, if an electro-mechanical system is used to build such a model, isn't it a "computer"?

Well, let's guess who would be interested in something called a computer in the 1940s.

The answer, of course, is von Neumann, the father of computers.

Wiener actively introduced the work of Pitts and McCulloch to von Neumann, who took inspiration from the McCulloch-Pitts model and proposed the von Neumann structure. In June 1945, von Neumann quoted only one published article in his landmark report, the first draft of the EDVAC report ("First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC"), that is, the McCulloch-Pitts paper.

In addition to promoting the development of computers, Wiener gathered a group of neuroscientists and set up his interdisciplinary dream research team to advance his great cause of control theory (Cybernetics), dedicated to unifying biology and electro-mechanical equipment under the same system theory.

Wiener believes that the communication and behavior of organisms can be modeled, electro-mechanical devices can also have the same learning ability as organisms, and electro-mechanical devices based on control theory can soon replace human beings to complete a large number of tasks.

Wiener succeeded. After formally proposing "Control Theory" in 1949, he became a star in the academic circle. His control theory work "Cybernetics: the Science of Control and Communication in Animals and machines" and the popular science version of the control theory "Human usefulness" are both classics.

"Cybernetics: the science of control and communication in animals and machines", Wiener briefly defines "control theory" in the title, that is, "the science of control and communication in animals and machines". Photo Source: monoskop.org

Wiener mentioned in "Human usefulness" that science and technology may have an impact on human society and may cause oppression and exploitation to some people. These problems are not out of date in the hot artificial intelligence today. Photo Source: goodreads.com

Wiener has made pioneering contributions to computer science, artificial intelligence, robotics and automation, and has become a veritable "father of cybernetics".

But surprisingly and sadly, the same story did not happen to Pitts.

Just as Pitts became a new star in the scientific community and began to shine, in 1952, Wiener suddenly unilaterally announced that he had severed ties with Pitts and McCulloch.

Why is this?

It is said that Wiener's wife hated McCulloch, so she stirred up discord and kept Wiener away from Croke and Pitts. Others say it is Wiener's own arrogant and eccentric personality attack.

In short, Wiener neither explained nor saw Pitts again, which suddenly and completely cut him off from the young man he had always liked.

Pitts never recovered.

After that, his study of frog eyes pushed him into a desperate situation-the relationship between the brain and neurons was so complex that it could not be answered with pure logic. This completely subverted his worldview.

Pitts and Letterman worked together to study the connection between frog vision and the brain. Photo Source: web.csulb.edu

However, he did not foresee that although his previous view was not entirely applicable to the biological brain, it promoted numerical computing, neural network methods in machine learning, and so on.

Later, Pitts lost his passion for research and everything. He refused to grant him a doctorate from MIT and even burned his doctoral thesis-the paper on three-dimensional artificial neural networks that the entire academic community was waiting for.

In the last years of his life, a discouraged Pitts, accompanied by alcohol, died in 1969 of a complication of alcoholism, a ruptured esophageal varices.

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As contemporary onlookers, there is nothing we can do but regret, and there will be no Pitts on the list of the greatest scientists of the 20th century.

Perhaps in some parallel universe, Wiener and Pitts can always work happily together to develop artificial intelligence and deep learning decades ahead of time. Perhaps today, self-driving and all kinds of automation facilities have long been popular.

However, there is no such "maybe" in our universe.

Let's just hope that when we enjoy the conveniences of artificial intelligence, there are a few small neurons in the brain that flash past two glowing geniuses whose names are Norbert Wiener and Walter Pitts.

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