Redefining Intelligence: McCulloch’s Contributions to AI Theory
The second founding father of AI, after Alan Turing, Warren Sturgis McCulloch was an American neuroscientist, logician, and cybernetician, who is best known for his contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and theoretical neuroscience.
Throughout his career, McCulloch was deeply interested in understanding the nature of intelligence and how it arises from the workings of the brain. His early work focused on the study of neural networks, and he was one of the first researchers to propose a model of computation based on the structure and function of neurons.
A simple Artificial Neural Network (ANN)
In 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts published a paper titled “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity”. The paper introduced a mathematical model of a simple artificial neural network, and proposed that the brain works in a similar way to this model. The model consisted of a set of interconnected “neurons” that could take on a binary state (on or off) and that could communicate with each other through synapses. This became known as the McCulloch-Pitts neuron, or MCP neuron. The paper proposed that the neurons in the brain work in a similar way, with the states of the neurons and the strengths of the connections between them…
