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Neural Net Worth


2018 Turing Award recipients Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yoshua Bengio

Credit: Alexander Berg

When Geoffrey Hinton started doing graduate student work on artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh in 1972, the idea that it could be achieved using neural networks that mimicked the human brain was in disrepute. Computer scientists Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert had published a book in 1969 on Perceptrons, an early attempt at building a neural net, and it left people in the field with the impression that such devices were nonsense.

"It didn't actually say that, but that's how the community interpreted the book," says Hinton who, along with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, will receive the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing award for their work that led deep neural networks to become an important component of today's computing. "People thought I was just completely crazy to be working on neural nets."


 

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