This inquiry examines a technique for automatically classifying (indexing) documents according to their subject content. The task, in essence, is to have a computing machine read a document and on the basis of the occurrence of selected clue words decide to which of many subject categories the document in question belongs. This paper describes the design, execution and evaluation of a modest experimental study aimed at testing empirically one statistical technique for automatic indexing.

This is an attempt to analyze attitudes and arguments brought forth by questions like "Can machines think?" and "Can machines exhibit intelligence?" Its purpose is to improve the climate which surrounds research in the field of machine or artificial intelligence. Its goal is not to convince those who answer the above questions negatively that they are wrong (although an attempt will be made to refute some of the negative arguments) but that they should be tolerant of research investigating these questions. The negative attitudes existent today tend to inhibit such research.Reprinted in Feigenbaum & Feldman, Computers and Thought (1963).Also in Datamation 9(3), March 1963, pp.34-38.Symposium on Bionics, Rand Technical Report 60 600, pp. 13-19

Frank Rosenblatt, born in New Rochelle, New York, U.S.A., July 11, 1928, graduated from Cornell University in 1950, and received a PhD degree in psychology, from the same university, in 1956. He was engaged in research on schizophrenia, as a Fellow of the U.S. Public Health Service, 1951-1953. He has made contributions to techniques of multivariate analysis, psychopathology, information processing and control systems, and physiological brain models. He is currently a Research Psychologist at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, Inc., in Buffalo, New York, where he Is Project Engineer responsible for Project PARA (Perceiving and Recognizing Automaton). FRANK ROSENBLATT SUMMARY A THEORETICAL brain model, the perceptron, has been developed at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, In Buffalo, New York. The perceptron is a probabilistic system, capable of learning to recognize and differentiate stimuli in its environment. Previous reports have covered the theory of a class of perceptrons ...

I am quite ready to subscribe to the already mentioned slogan that "whatever a human being can do,an appropriate machine can do, too"; but I do this only because.I regard the slogan as utterly trivial. At the moment, I am not talking about what maohines could do in principle but only about what actually existing or blueprinted machines could do, and it Is with regard to these that I utter my definite opinions. If someone wishes to write sciencefiction about information-processing centres of the (undetermined) future, let him do so and I shall discuss it with him over a glass of beer and even offer some startling suggestions of my own. If he is interested in improving the literature search process today, I would strongly advise him to forget about mechanizing abstracting or indexing. May I add that it is with a good amount of sorrow that I have come to this conclusion which is quite counter, to my temperament and my convictions (never published) of a few years ago.