Professor’s perceptron paved the way for AI – 60 years too soon

In July 1958, the U.S. Office of Naval Research unveiled a remarkable invention.An IBM 704 – a 5-ton computer the size of a room – was fed a series of punch cards. After 50 trials, the computer taught itself to distinguish cards marked on the left from cards marked on the right.It was a demonstration of the “perceptron” – “the first machine which is capable of having an original idea,” according to its creator, Frank Rosenblatt ’50, Ph.D. ’56.