Frank Rosenblatt

Overview

Frank Rosenblatt (1928–1971) was an American psychologist and project engineer, best known for the perceptron, an early machine that could learn from examples. He is remembered for that machine and for the debates it set off. He was born in New Rochelle, New York, on 11 July 1928. He died on 11 July 1971, his 43rd birthday, in a sailing accident on Chesapeake Bay.^[1]

Education

He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1946. He then earned an A.B. in 1950, with a focus on social psychology, and a PhD in psychology in 1956, both from Cornell University.^[1]

The perceptron

At the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo, New York, Rosenblatt worked as a research psychologist and project engineer, and he headed its cognitive systems section. There he developed the perceptron with support from the U.S. Office of Naval Research.^[1]

The perceptron is a simple model of a neuron. It multiplies each input by a weight, adds the results, and produces an output depending on whether the total passes a threshold. When it gets an answer wrong, its weights are adjusted. Over many examples it can learn to sort inputs into categories without anyone writing out the rule. Unlike a program with fixed instructions, its behaviour was set by the examples it was shown. His paper “The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in the Brain” appeared in Psychological Review in 1958.^[3]

The 1958 demonstration

In July 1958 the Office of Naval Research demonstrated the perceptron on an IBM 704 computer. After 50 trials, it had learned to distinguish cards marked on the left from cards marked on the right. A New York Times headline described the event as “New Navy Device Learns by Doing”.^[1]

Later work and hardware

In 1959 Rosenblatt moved the perceptron work to Cornell’s Ithaca campus, where he became director of the Cognitive Systems Research Program and a lecturer in psychology. He later became an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior, in 1966.^[1]

The Mark I Perceptron, a visual pattern classifier built as custom hardware and completed in 1960, is now held by the Smithsonian Institution.^[2] From 1961 to 1967 he built Tobermory, a four-layer perceptron for speech recognition. His book Principles of Neurodynamics was published in 1962.^[2]

Criticism and recognition

In 1969 Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert published the book Perceptrons, which criticised the perceptron approach. It is dedicated to Rosenblatt. In 2004 the IEEE established the Frank Rosenblatt Award in his honour.^[1]

Why he matters

Rosenblatt’s perceptron was an early and concrete attempt to build a machine that improves itself from data rather than following hand-written rules. The limits that Minsky and Papert analysed pointed to a question that the later entries in this archive address: how to train networks with more than one layer of adjustable weights.