Geoffrey Hinton

No, it really goes back to the 1950s.

Oh, right.

The founders of AI, at the beginning in the 1950s, there were two views of how to make an intelligent system.

One was inspired by logic.

The idea was that the essence of intelligence is reasoning.

And in reasoning, what you do is you take some premises, and you take some rules for manipulating expressions, and you derive some conclusions.

So it's much like mathematics, where you have an equation, you have rules for how you can tinker with both sides, or combine equations, and you derive new equations.

And that was kind of the paradigm they had.

There was a completely different paradigm that was biological.

And that paradigm said, look, the intelligent things we know have brains.

We have to figure out how brains work.

And the way they work is they're very good at things like perception.

They're quite good at reasoning by analogy.

They're not much good at reasoning.

You have to get to be a teenager before you can do reasoning, really.

So we should really study these other things they do.

And we should figure out how big networks of brain cells can do these other things, like perception and memory.

Now, a few people believed in that approach, and among those few people were John von Neumann and Alan Turing.

Unfortunately, they both died young.

Turing, possibly with the help of British intelligence.