The perceptron: the 1958 machine that learned from its mistakes
How one artificial neuron makes a decision, and how it fixes itself when it's wrong. In 1958, psychologist Frank Rosenblatt unveiled the perceptron at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory. The press got excited. The New York Times wrote that the Navy expected it to one day walk, talk, see, and write. It couldn't do any of that. But it introduced an idea that every modern neural network still uses: a machine that improves by fixing its own mistakes. Under the hood, a perceptron is a single artifi…