BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Oliver G. Selfridge was born in London 10 May 1926. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1942-1945, returning postgraduately from 1946-1950. After 2 years at Signal Corps Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, he joined Lincoln Laboratories in Group 34, Communication Techniques, of which he is now Group Leader. INTRODUCTION WE are proposing here a model of a process which we claim can adaptively improve itself to handle certain pattern recognition problems Which cannot be adequately specified in advance. Such problems are usual when trying' to build a machine to Imitate any one of a very large class of human data processing techniques. A speech typewriter is a good example of something that very many people have been trying unsuccessfully to build for some time. We do not suggest that we have proposed a model which can learn to typewrite from merely hearing speech. Pandemonium does not, however, seem on paper to have the same kinds of inherent restrictions or inflexibility that many previous proposals have had. The basic motif behind our model is the Inn of parallel processing.