# Connectionism **Domain:** Artificial Intelligence / Cognitive Science / Neural Networks **Doc Type:** Canonical Concept Node **Maturity:** Foundational ## Definition **Connectionism** explains cognition or computation through networks of simple interacting units whose weighted connections produce learned or emergent behavior. ## Historical Context The connectionist research program continued internationally after the 1969 publication of _Perceptrons_. Work by [[wiki/Alexey Ivakhnenko|Alexey Ivakhnenko]], [[wiki/Shun-Ichi Amari|Shun-Ichi Amari]], [[wiki/Kaoru Nakano|Kaoru Nakano]] and [[wiki/Kunihiko Fukushima|Kunihiko Fukushima]] shows that contraction in one funding ecology was not global termination. ## See Also [[wiki/Artificial Neural Networks|Artificial Neural Networks]], [[wiki/Distributed Representation|Distributed Representation]], [[wiki/Deep Learning|Deep Learning]] ## Relationships - **Edge source route:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] connects this topic to exact Annual Question passages promoted into the Simple Reminders archive. ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > “By the sixties, cyberneticians were using models of negative feedback originally developed for the steam engine, and greatly expanded upon during the war of the forties for controlling the aiming of guns, to try develop models for the brain. But these soon ran out of steam, so to speak, and were supplanted in the general consciousness by metaphors of the brain as a digital computer. One started to hear claims of the brain as the hardware, and the mind as the software, a model that really did not end up helping our understanding of either the brain or the mind very much at all. Throughout the later parts of the twentieth century the brain became a massively parallel digital supercomputer, and now one can find claims that the brain and the world wide web are similar in how they work with webpages and neurons playing similar roles, while hyperlinks and synapses map to each other.” > **— Rodney A. Brooks**, *2014, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Idea Is Ready For Retirement?”* [[reminders/Cybernetics/The Computational Metaphor Distorts How We Understand the Brain by Rodney A. Brooks|The Computational Metaphor Distorts How We Understand the Brain by Rodney A. Brooks]]