1958Reputable sourceWell documented
The Perceptron
On the timeline · around 1958 ·
What happened
Frank Rosenblatt built the Perceptron, an early artificial neural network that could learn to recognize simple patterns such as letters. It was greeted with enormous enthusiasm — one report called it the first serious rival to the human brain — but in 1969 Minsky and Papert showed a single-layer perceptron could not compute basic functions like XOR.
Why it matters
The Perceptron pioneered the trainable neural network, the idea at the heart of today's AI — even though its early limitations helped trigger the first collapse of the field.