In 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts met at the University of Chicago, and they became fast friends even though their backgrounds were starkly different as were their ages (McCulloch was 42 and Pitts was 18). McCulloch grew up in a wealthy Eastern Establishment family, having gone to prestigious schools. Pitts, on the other hand, grew up in a low-income neighborhood and was even homeless as a teenager.
Despite all this, the partnership would turn into one of the most consequential in the development of AI. McCulloch and Pitts developed new theories to explain the brain, which often went against the conventional wisdom of Freudian psychology. But both of them thought that logic could explain the power of the brain and also looked at the insights from Alan Turing. From this, they co-wrote a paper in 1943 called “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” and it appeared in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. The thesis was that the brain’s core functions like neurons and synapses could be explained by logic and mathematics, say with logical operators like And, Or, and Not. With these, you could construct a complex network that could process information, learn, and think.
Ironically, the paper did not get much traction with neurologists. But it did get the attention with those working on computers and AI.
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