Of Great God Cybernetics And His Fair-Haired Child

Pennist, Elizabeth. "Neural Nets Are Sparking Heated Debates Among Their Enthusiasts" and "Of Great God Cybernetics And His Fair-Haired Child." The Scientist 14 Nov. 1988: 1 f.

"The advantage of neural networks" in advanced computers "over AI is that they 'think' like a real brain, instead of performing computations in a linear sequence" (5). See for recent in-fighting among computer scientists, and esp. for the notable little tale of how ". . . the great god Cybernetics begat two promising daughters" and how those daughters "vied for the attention of the Dark Prince DARPA" (the US agency funding advanced research projects with national security possibilities); this tale of personified AI and Neural Networks combines myth with fable, folktale, and allegory and, significantly, was written by Seymour Papert, emphatically a scientist and not a writer of SF.