From: pfsum@cucs18.cs.cuhk.hk (Sum Pui Fai)
Subject: Re: Rosenblatt's book revisited
Organization: Faculty of Engineering, The Chinese U. of Hong Kong
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 03:07:39 GMT

I also glad that there is someone else in the world having the
same feeling as me. Recently, there are so many researcher who
do misunderstand (I feel) the original motivation of the Perceptron.
The following message is quoted from a book called Self-Organizing
Systems, edited by M.C.Yovits and C.Cameron in 1990. It is a    
proceeding of an international conference in self-organizing system.
In which, there is a paper written by Frank Rosenblatt. At the back
of the article, a discussion is included. While he was answering a 
question from one of the audience during the conference, he said the 
following.

Well, first of all let me say that we are interested in duplicating
human learning, if it is possible to do so. We are interested in 
determining the extend to which it is feasible to consider such a thing
as duplicating human learning, or at least understanding how human
learning operates. Whether or not there exists a better mode of learning
is in sense an empirical question to which I don't feel we can
supply an answer at this point. 

Besides, he also said this:

We interested , however, not only in studying human learning, but in
the studying the behavior of networks which include biological nervous
systems as a subclass. That is to say, we are interested in study of
signal transmission networks which involve connected nodes or cell
points which have functional characteristics similar to those of
biological neurons, but not necessarily identical.

If it emerges from the study of such systems that some of these behave
better than otheres or some of them so in fact behave better thatn human
nervous systems, this would be a very interesting finding indeed. But it
would emerge from the study of this general class of systems and is not
something I feel we can specially aim for at this point.

                            ********

It seems to be quite clear that his direction of research is to 1)
understand human learning mechanism, 2) duplicating human learning.
Duplicating human learning involves the studying the behavior of neural
network and building the neural network. However, he didn't mention 
his goal of the network. He just said,"If it emerges from the study of
such systems that behave better than human, this would be interesting 
finding."


As an inforamtion, below list out some paper which were written by 
Frank Rosenblatt. 

1. Rosenblatt F.(1958). The Perveptron: The Probabilistics Model fro
Information Stroage and Organization in the Brain. Psychological Review,
65, 386-408, 1958.    
Comment : It is the first paper of Rosenblatt. The first half of the
paper has elucidated the motivation of the Perceptron and three
fundamental questions on human cognition. The later part of the paper is
mathematical intensive which I don't quite understand.  

2. Rosenblatt F. (1962). Principles of Neurodynamics. Spartans Books,
1962.

3. Rosenblatt F. (1964). A Model for Experiential Storage in Neural
Network. In Computer and Information Science, edited by J.T.Tou and R.H.
Wilcox. Spartan, 1964.

4. Rosenblatt F. (1967). Recent Work on Theorical Models of Biological
Memory. In Computer ans Inforamtion Science-II, edited by J.T. Tou,
Academic Press, 1967.

5. Block H.D. (1962). The Perceptron: A Model for Brain Functioning I.
Review of Modern Physics, Vol 34, 123-135, 1962.

6. Block H.D., Knoght B.W.Jr and Rosenblatt F. (1962). Analysis of a
Four-Layer Series-Coupled Perceptron II> Review of Modern Physics. Vol
34, 135-142, 1962.


Hope you all enjoy these. 

John Sum 
Department of Computer Science,
Chinese University of Hong Kong
e-mail : pfsum@cucs26.cs.cuhk.hk
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