The Brain Works by Logic
The Brain Works by Logic
Brains and computers were twins separated at birth. In 1943, it was known that action potentials were all or none, approximating TRUE or FALSE. In that year, Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch wrote a paper suggesting that neurons were computing logic functions and that networks of such neurons could compute any finite logic function. This was a bold and exciting large-scale theory of brain function. Around the same time, the first digital computer, the ENIAC, was being built. The McCulloch-Pitts work was well known to the scientists building ENIAC. The connection between them appeared explicitly in a report by John von Neumann on the successor to the ENIAC, the EDVAC. It soon became clear that biological brain computation was not based on logic functions. However, this idea was believed by many scientists for decades. A brilliant wrong theory can sometimes cause trouble.
Keywords: Walter Pitts, Warren McCulloch, McCulloch-Pitts neuron, logic-based neuron, Leibniz, ENIAC, EDVAC, John Von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Paul Werbos
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