I'm absolutely blown away by the fact that the possibility of recurrent neural networks encoding memory was discovered and published <i>before</i> electronic computers existed, and that the construction was entirely theoretical, based on first principles alone.
"Not only did Russell write back [about the proposed corrections to be made to Principia Mathematica], he was so impressed that he invited Pitts to study with him as a graduate student at Cambridge University in England. Pitts couldn’t oblige him, though — he was only 12 years old."
Genius is often coupled with depression; sometimes in order to see the world is different light you need a different brain to see it with. I often wonder how a genius like Pitts can appear out of common people with no apparent genius in them - genetics is often a cruel process where amazing results are often coupled with not so amazing side effects.
> In a way Pitts was still 12 years old. He was still beaten, still a runaway, still hiding from the world in musty libraries. Only now his books took the shape of a bottle.<p>In an otherwise fine article, this was a staggeringly insensitive statement about the man's struggle with depression. That too at an age where it was even more poorly understood than today.
> The higher the probability, the higher the entropy and the lower the information content.<p>Is this a known and/or understood statement? It seems to be saying a lot for so few words. Would love any other sources that could expand on it.