Meet Walter Pitts, the Homeless Genius Who Revolutionized Artificial Intelligence

“…the experiment with the frogs had shown that a purely logical, purely brain-centered vision of thought had its limits. Nature had chosen the messiness of life over the austerity of logic, a choice Pitts likely could not comprehend. He had no way of knowing that while his ideas about the biological brain were not panning out, they were setting in motion the age of digital computing, the neural network approach to machine learning, and the so-called connectionist philosophy of mind. In his own mind, he had been defeated.”