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Talk:Warren Sturgis McCulloch

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Copyrighted or not copyrighted?

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Look here - it is 1:1 copy. Popped out of google after another search. 82.207.56.172 22:47, 2 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Turing meeting

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Why was the reference to his meeting with Turing removed? Just because Turing didn't say nice things about him? -- NIC1138 (talk) 08:39, 3 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

@Nwerneck: Please add it back if it was referenced.Jonpatterns (talk) 10:56, 9 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
He met Alan Turing once, but Turing dismissed him as a 'charlatan'.

Haverford

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Explanation of insertion of "attended Haverford": not sure this is the place and not expectant that it will remain. In WSM's 1963 (or late 1962) talk at Case Institute of Technology, titled "Command and Control in Vertebrate Systems"--whose thesis was on the order of, "We have found the homunculus, and it is the retic; with its redundant command potential, in which the authority depends on the type of information"--he started out with this anecdote: "I was a freshman at Haverford, and one day found myself walking alongside the philosophy professor Rufus Jones. 'Tell me, young man,' he said, 'what does the intend to do with thy life?' 'I want to learn what is man that he may know a numbah,' I said, 'and what is a numbah that man may know it.' 'Then will thee be busy the rest of thy life,' said Prof. Jones."

After the lecture, I approached him to ask my question. Someone else was asking him the meaning of "defecation," one of the several functions he had listed, among which the reticular formation seems to decide. "Crapping," he said. I asked him the meaning of "redundant command potential, in which the authority depends on the kind of information." "Ever been on a bear hunt?" he asked. My reply may be imagined, and Dr. McCullough explained that the hunters spread out and walk through the woods, unable to see one another, with no one in charge until one calls out, "Bear!" at which that hunter, the one who knows where a bear is, becomes the leader of the hunt and issues instructions.

Stuart Filler, 67

turing-complete

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The sentence

In the 1943 paper they attempted to demonstrate that a Turing machine program could be implemented in a finite network of formal neurons, (in the event, the Turing Machine contains their model of the brain, but the converse is not true) that the neuron was the base logic unit of the brain.

seems a bit unclear to me. In the paper (available at [1] and at [2]) they claim on page 17 that the following are easily shown:

  • first, that every net, if furnished with a tape, scanners connected to afferents, and suitable efferents to perform the necessary motor-operations, can compute only such numbers as can a Turing machine;
  • second, that each of the latter numbers can be computed by such a net;
  • and that nets with circles can be computed by such a net;
  • and that nets with circles can compute, without scanners and a tape, some of the numbers the machine can, * but no others,
  • and not all of them.

If I understand this correctly, they says that

  • for any Turing machine, the (finite) state transition function, sometimes also called the "CPU" of a Turing maching can be modelled by a finite network of their neurons
  • every Turing-computable function can be computed by a network with neurons, augmented by "memory", i.e., a potentially infinite tape
  • all functions computable by a network of neurons without tape are Turing-computable
  • not all Turing-computable functions are computable by a network of neurons without tape.

This seems very plausible to me - after all, a network of neurons without tape is just a version of a finite automaton.

--Aleph4 (talk) 14:12, 19 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@Aleph4: I think your expanded explanation is clearer, I would be in flavor of it being added to the article. Jonpatterns (talk) 10:56, 9 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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