Back in the nineteen-nineties I'd built a neural-net creator using a method other than back-propogation that was able to create nets with about a hundred neuron

Back in the nineteen-nineties I'd built a neural-net creator using a method other than back-propogation that was able to create nets with about a hundred neurons that played tic-tac-toe well or perfectly (depending on the net created that day.) This was on a 12 mhz 286 using what I called static point multiplication (based on shift instructions, not multiplication instructions.) So I went to Toronto to see Professor Hinton, to share. My not being a big back-propagation fan was one thing that divided us before meeting him, but otherwise I thought we'd be pretty much on the same page. It didn't go well. I happened to mention that I thought parallel programming would be a big help speeding up neural nets, and that I'd toured such a multi-processor computer in Alberta. He blew up. I never got to explain what I'd done with neural nets. He tossed me out of his office summarily and wouldn't listen to another word I had to say - somehow he'd gotten the idea in his head that I was a salesman for the company whose machine I'd seen, which machine was too weird to be considered anyway, and absolutely nothing I could say would persuade him that I wasn't a salesman. So the nets I'd created and methods other than back-propagation never got mentioned. Weirdest meeting of my life, and the end of my desire to do anything with neural nets, since other academic departments were even more violently rejecting of the idea back then.