It's not widely known, but Alan Turing tinkered with neural nets in 1948, see [1], with his boss at the time calling Turing's work a "schoolboy essay". For a h

It's not widely known, but Alan Turing tinkered with neural nets in 1948, see [1], with his boss at the time calling Turing's work a "schoolboy essay". For a history of the subject, see Section 5.1 of [2]. Note that some parts of [2] are rather controversial. For a historical account of back-progagation, which itself was 'invented' many times, see [3, 4]. It is also not widely known that regular expressions, one of programmers' favourite tools, were introduced by Kleene in [5]: he was interested in characterising the behaviour of McCulloch-Pitts "nerve nets" (early versions of neural nets) and finite automata. [1] http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/reference%20articles/connectionism/Turing's%20neural%20networks.html http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/reference%20a... [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.7828 https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.7828 [3] https://www.math.uni-bielefeld.de/documenta/vol-ismp/52_griewank-andreas-b.pdf https://www.math.uni-bielefeld.de/documenta/vol-ismp/52_grie... [4] http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/who-invented-backpropagation.html http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/who-invented-backpropagation... [5] S. Kleene, Representation of events in nerve nets and finite automata, see https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2008/RM704.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand...