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Kybernetik in Urbana

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Kybernetik in Urbana Kybernetik in Urbana Ein Gespräch zwischen Paul Weston, Jan Müggenburg und James Andrew Hutchinson1 Paul Ernest Weston was born on February 3rd 1935 in Garland, Maine. After stu- dying physics at Wesleyan University in Middletown (Connecticut), 1952 through 1956, Paul Weston came to the University of Illinois in summer 1956, receiving his M.S. in August 1958. The following autumn, as a graduate student of physics, he attended a seminar led by Heinz von Foerster under the promising title „Cyberne- tics“.2 In June 1959 Paul joins the newly founded Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) as a half time research assistant employed by the Electrical Engineering Department. Through roughly 1962, Weston’s primary emphasis was upon simulation of the processes of perception, with work in neuron models and pattern recognition. Together with Murray Babcock, Weston was one of the most prominent creators of prototypes built at the BCL. Already in 1961 Weston becomes widely known as the inventor of the NumaRete, a parallel operated pattern recognition machine, which played an important role in the public perception of the BCL through out the fol- lowing years.3 After 1964 Weston continues his research at BCL on the basis of a full position as a research assistant and starts to focus on information processing, particularly inte- rested in problems associated with natural-language interaction with machine. As a member of the Committee for Cognitive Studies Weston is also increasingly interes- ted in the potentials of how the new information technologies could shape society. In June 1970 Weston receives his PhD for developing a new and more efficient data structure called CYLINDER.4 After the BCL was closed in 1975 Weston continued to work as a Research Associate at the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory of the University of Illinois. Jan Mueggenburg: Paul, you were a member of the Biological Computer-group from the very beginning in 1958 until its end. Heinz von Foerster often referred to you as one of the key characters, if you want to understand the history of the BCL. Do you remember when you first met him? 126 ÖZG 19.2008.4 Paul Weston: Oh, of course! The time I first saw Heinz? That vision will always remain in my head! It’s one of these things you have a mental picture of even several years later. It was a lecture hall in the fall of 1958 and I was attending a seminar on „Cybernetics“. I was sitting in one of the back rows and he was down there talk- ing. I simply had never seen a man who could deliver a message like that. He was completely organized, entirely engaged and of course talking about a topic that absolutely fascinated me at that time! JM: In your text „A walk through the Forest“ you mention that you were very excited about Norbert Wiener’s ideas on Cybernetics at that time and that it was his book, which eventually brought you to Heinz and the BCL. If you look back, how popular was Wiener’s book and the concept of „Cybernetics“ among young student like you? What exactly did you find so fascinating about it? PW: Well, I am not sure if I can express precisely why I was intrigued with that, so maybe you can explain to me why you are so intrigued with the material now? [laughs] I guess to you that’s a very old book now, but for us of course it was fresh and new in the 50s. When I was getting out of College in the year 1956 I was becoming aware of folks like that. I can remember Grey Walter’s turtles and Norbert Wiener, at the same time, had published some articles about these little machines he had built, that could find their way on their own. It’s just the sort of thing that resonates with you. It simply generated genuine excitement and of course it was at the dawn of an era when things that now seem so primitive were revelations when they were done. Shannon’s Information Theory for example, I had been introduced to that in my last year in college. That was a revelation, that you could schematize the thing to that degree! So these all fit together. Things that have to do with actually bringing out stuff which is associated with the human mind I think was the essence of interest, which was of course a core idea throughout BCL’s existence. JM: So I guess one could say that Cybernetics for you is where it all started, but what about the rest of the Engineering world? It seems that many people had a copy of Wiener’s book at that time, but did they actually read it or was it just a book you had to have on your bookshelves? PW: Well as you probably know our experience at BCL was a very isolated one. We were almost hermetically sealed from the rest of the Electrical Engineering World. We didn’t really belong to that, although we were of course based in what was certainly the technology available or being developed in the electrical engi- neering of that time, the computer and things that led to the computer, the use of information theory and so on. Concerning Norbert Wiener’s work, I don’t think that it had simply taken over as the book to read or something like that. It was a very popular book for a technology book. It sold well and it was certainly known ÖZG 19.2008.4 127 everywhere, but it was not something everybody had to read. I doubt that too many of my acquaintances there in the school had any interest in it… JM: Do you remember if Norbert Wiener ever visited the BCL? Did you ever meet him? PW: Well, Norbert Wiener was never part of the presence that I experienced. I don’t recall him ever visiting our campus at a time at least when I was there. But of course Heinz knew him well through the conferences. As you probably know, War- ren McCulloch got him established in the United States and got him into the Macy Conferences. He helped him get his position at the University of Illinois. McCulloch was always playing the role of the grand old man and the two of them together were an unstoppable combination. I can still remember that long white beard and the pontifical statements, which sure had a certain amount of truth to them. So it wasn’t just all hot air. McCulloch’s interest at that time was the possibility of finding out how neural networks do things that are part of the life of living creatures. And I guess it was not long after that Humberto Maturana’s article came out about the frog’s eye and the frog’s brain. So that was where it started… JM: To what degree did this paper written by Maturana and Jerome Lettvin, „What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain“ influence you in your work at the BCL? PW: As I say, our first year was very intensely focused on the possibility of neu- ral networks. Murray Babcock was building his machine using the only technology we had at that time, which was barely adequate to simulate even the simple – very naïve by present standards actually – model of the neuron that we had. And, as you are undoubtedly very familiar with Heinz’s output, he started publishing right away things having to do with neural networks. We had graduate students at that time who were interested in the field. I remember having long arguments with Ron Swallow who was one of those. He was totally convinced that the conditioned reflex, which of course was about all we could simulate with our idea of the neuron at the time, was the only building block needed to simulate higher intelligence and I said that couldn’t possibly be, myself. I still hold to that opinion. But yes we had a great activity centered on that and I was also a skeptic with respect to that network busi- ness. That was, of course, the time when Frank Rosenblatt from Cornell University5 came out with his Perceptron. Seymour Papert and Marvin Minsky immediately pounced on that with the usual venom and vigor that MIT men pounce on anything that they want to suppress. And they definitely showed that there were mathemati- cal limits to what that thing could do and it was pretty much in the forefront of anybody’s thinking about neural nets at the time. I of course was a skeptic anyway and it didn’t bother me that the Perceptron turned out to be a failure. JM: You’ve then of course built our own parallel computer, which became quite famous. A device that could count the number of objects you put on its surface! 128 ÖZG 19.2008.4 PW: Yes, I built the NumaRete and I said to myself I am not going to make the same mistake. I am, however, going to show that you can have a machine that can reliably sense some abstract property of its environment – without being a neural net! But it had to be a repetitive network of some type, by the nature of it! I used these photocells and I guess that was my Achilles’ heel. I built this thing and it worked beautifully. So we took it to a little exposition down to the state capital and passersby came and they tried to fool it, but it just couldn’t be fooled! We had these little things with holes in the middle to put on the NumaRete and you could put other objects inside these holes and it still counted correctly.
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