70th Anniversary of Publication: Warren McCulloch & Walter Pitts - A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity

Abstract

In 1943, a paper by Warren McCulloch & Walter Pitts [6] entitled “A logical calculus of the ideas immanent to nervous activity“ was published, which is now considered as one of the seminal papers that initiated the formation of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. In this paper concepts of logical (threshold) neurons and neural networks were introduced. It was proved that an arbitrary Boolean function may be represented by a feedforward (acyclic) neural network composed of threshold neurons, i.e. this type of neural network is a universal approximator in the domain of Boolean functions. The present paper recalls the core achievements of this paper and puts it into perspective from the point of view of further achievements based on their approach. Particularly, S. Kleene [5] and M. Minsky [7] extended this theory by their study of relationships between neural networks and finite state machines. The present paper is not a standard research article where new ideas or approaches would be presented. However, the 70th anniversary of publication of the McCulloch and Pitts paper should be sufficiently important to recall this core event in computer science and artificial intelligence. In particular, the main concept of their paper opened unexpected ways to study processes in the human brain. Their approach offers a way to treat a core philosophical mind/body problem in such a way that the brain is considered as a neural network and the mind is interpreted as a product of its functional properties.