ABSTRACT
The computer scientist John McCarthy is generally credited with coining the term 'artificial intelligence' in 1956, suggesting that computing machines could somehow mimic the functions of the human brain. In 1958, the psychologist Frank Rosenblatt put forth a theory of'perceptrons' that was the precursor of today's modern neural networks. Rosenblatt posited that it was theoretically possible to represent visual information by'teaching' a crude digital facsimile of a human neuron, and thereby encode human knowledge in accessible form. While Negroponte examined questions of the representation, generation and manipulation of 3D space, other work considered core to understanding human thought probed what was called natural language processing: computers understanding and creating the written word. The computers available to architects today are more adept at direct problemsolving than what Stanford Anderson once called 'problem-worrying', resolving the goals of the problem while simultaneously creating the design, evocative of both Negroponte's and Peter Rowe's interest in heuristics as a strategy for solving 'wicked problems'.
