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A: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Selfridge's Model for Learning and Adaptation to a Complex Environment

1958

In 1958 English-American artificial intelligence pioneer Oliver Selfridge of MIT published "Pandemonium: A Paradigm for Learning," Mechanisation of Thought Processes: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at the National Physical Laboratory on 24th, 25th, 26th and 27th November 1958 (1959) 511–26. In it he proposed a collection of small components dubbed “demons” that together would allow machines to recognize patterns, and might trigger subsequent events according to patterns they recognized. This model of learning and adaptation to a complex environment based on multiple independent processing systems was influential in psychology as well as neurocomputing and artificial intelligence.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 878.

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