Seymour A. Papert

Mindstorms has two central themes: that children can learn to use computers in a masterful way and that learning to use computers can change the way they learn everything else. Even outside the classroom, Papert had a vision that the computer could be used just as casually and as personally for a diversity of purposes throughout a person's entire life. Seymour Papert makes the point that in classrooms saturated with technology there is actually more socialization and that the technology often contributes to greater interaction among students and among students and instructors.

Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas

Mindstorms

Léon Bottou

Marvin Minsky

Reissue of the 1988 Expanded Edition with a new foreword by Léon Bottou In 1969, ten years after the discovery of the perceptron -- which showed that a machine could be taught to perform certain tasks using examples -- Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert published Perceptrons, their analysis of the computational capabilities of perceptrons for specific tasks. As Léon Bottou writes in his foreword to this edition, "Their rigorous work and brilliant technique does not make the perceptron look very good." Perhaps as a result, research turned away from the perceptron. Then the pendulum swung back, and machine learning became the fastest-growing field in computer science. Minsky and Papert's insistence on its theoretical foundations is newly relevant. Perceptrons -- the first systematic study of parallelism in computation -- marked a historic turn in artificial intelligence, returning to the idea that intelligence might emerge from the activity of networks of neuron-like entities. Minsky and Papert provided mathematical analysis that showed the limitations of a class of computing machines that could be considered as models of the brain. Minsky and Papert added a new chapter in 1987 in which they discuss the state of parallel computers, and note a central theoretical challenge: reaching a deeper understanding of how "objects" or "agents" with individuality can emerge in a network. Progress in this area would link connectionism with what the authors have called "society theories of mind."

Seymour A. Papert

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