Machine learning, meet quantum computing

Back in 1958, in the earliest days of the computing revolution, the US Office of Naval Research organized a press conference to unveil a device invented by a psychologist named Frank Rosenblatt at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory. Rosenblatt called his device a perceptron, and the New York Times reported that it was "the embryo of an electronic computer that [the Navy] expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself, and be conscious of its existence." Those claims turned out to be somewhat overblown. But the device kick-started a field of research that still has huge potential today. A perceptron is a single-layer neural network.