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McCulloch. Indeed, McCulloch—the prime author, a few years earlier, of what became
the seminal paper in cognitive science (McCulloch and Pitts 1943)—was their very first
speaker in December 1949. (Bates and Donald MacKay, who’d hatched the idea of the
club on a shared train journey after visiting Grey Walter, knew that McCulloch was due
to visit England and timed the first meeting accordingly.) Turing himself gave a guest
talk on Educating a Digital Computer exactly a year later, and soon became a member.
(His other talk to the club was on morphogenesis.) Professors were barred, to protect
the openness of speculative discussion. So the imaginative anatomist J. Z. Young
(who’d discovered the squid’s giant neurones, and later suggested the ‘selective’
account of learning) 6 couldn’t join the club, but gave a talk as a guest.

The club’s archives contain a list of thirty possible discussion topics drawn up by Ashby
Grey Walter’s Anticipatory Tortoises (Owen Holland p.c.). Virtually all of these are still current. What’s more, if one ignores

Margaret Boden the details, they can’t be better answered now than they could in those days. These
wide-ranging meetings were enormously influential, making intellectual waves that are
still spreading in various areas of cognitive science. The neurophysiologist Horace
Barlow (p.c.) now sees them as crucial for his own intellectual development, in leading
Grey Walter and the Ratio Club
him to think about the nervous system in terms of information theory.7 And Giles
The British physiologist William Grey Walter (1910–1977) was an early member of the Brindley, another important neuroscientist, 8 who was brought along as a guest by
interdisciplinary Ratio Club. This was a small dining club that met several times a year Barlow before joining for a short time, also remembers them as hugely exciting
from 1949 to 1955, with a nostalgic final meeting in 1958, at London’s National occasions. 9 Our specific interest here, however, is in the machines built by one member
Hospital for Neurological Diseases. The founder-secretary was the neurosurgeon John of the Ratio Club: Grey Walter’s tortoises. These were intended to model general
Bates, who had worked (alongside the psychologist Kenneth Craik) on aspects of purpose and learning. Considered as physical objects, they were intriguing
servomechanisms for gun turrets during the war. gadgets that attracted enormous publicity (frowned on by some Ratio members) in the
newspapers. Their theoretical interest, however, was significant.
The club was a pioneering source of ideas in what Norbert Wiener had recently dubbed
‘cybernetics’. 1 Indeed, Bates’ archive shows that the letter inviting membership spoke More ‘interest’, perhaps, than immediate influence. With hindsight we can now see how
of ‘people who had Wiener’s ideas before Wiener’s book appeared’. 2 In fact, its hugely insightful they were. But that 20-20 vision wasn’t available to their
founders had considered calling it the Craik Club, in memory of Craik’s work—not least, contemporaries. Some people got the point, to be sure. The French cybernetician Pierre
his stress on ‘synthetic’ models of psychological theories.3 In short, the club was the de Latil (1953), for instance, regarded them as ‘revolutionary’, and wrote about their
nucleus of a thriving British tradition of cybernetics, started independently of the wider scientific—and philosophical—implications at length. (His book was soon
transatlantic version. translated into English by a relation of Grey Walter’s boss, the neurologist Frederick
Golla.) However, the primitive state of electronic technology didn’t enable those
The Ratio members—about twenty at any given time—were a very carefully chosen
implications to be explored in practice.
group. Several of them had been involved in wartime signals research or intelligence
work at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing had used primitive computers to decipher That wouldn’t be possible until the late 1980s, with the development of behaviour-
the Nazis’ Enigma code.4 They were drawn from a wide range of disciplines: clinical based (situated) robotics and computational neuroethology. 10
psychiatry and neurology, physiology, neuroanatomy, mathematics/statistics, physics,
Robots at the Festival
astrophysics, and the new areas of control engineering and computer science. 5
Grey Walter was the first Director of Physiology (from 1939) at Golla’s newly-founded
The aim was to discuss novel ideas: their own, and those of guests—such as Warren
Burden Neurological Institute, Bristol. He was a highly influential electro-
McCulloch. Indeed, McCulloch—the prime author, a few years earlier, of what became
encephalographer. For instance, he discovered the delta and theta rhythms, and
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encephalographer. For instance, he discovered the delta and theta rhythms, and over there last winter and found his views somewhat difficult to absorb, but
designed several pioneering EEG-measuring instruments. In addition, he founded the he represents quite a large group in the States… These people are thinking
EEG Society (in 1943), organized the first EEG Congress (1947), and started the EEG on very much the same lines as Kenneth Craik did, but with much less
Journal (also 1947). With his EEG expert’s hat on, he focussed on the overall effects of sparkle and humour.16
large populations of neurones rather than on specific cell connections. But his robots,
Wiener himself was more generous—or perhaps just more polite. In a letter thanking
as we’ll see, used as few ‘neurones’ as possible.
Grey Walter for his hospitality during this brief visit, he wrote ‘I got a great deal out of
His interest in the EEG dated from his time at Cambridge in the early 1930s, when he our trip, and am certain that it will be possible to renew our contact at some future
worked on muscle contraction with Edgar D. Adrian. Ever since the first paper on EEG date’.17
(by Hans Berger) in 1929, Adrian was a key pioneer in the field. He discovered body
In particular, Grey Walter sought to model goal seeking and, later, learning. But he did
mappings (of the limbs, for instance) in both cerebellar and cerebral cortex. And he
so as economically as he could—in both the financial and the theoretical sense. Not
predicted that improved brain-monitoring technologies would one day—fifty years later,
only did he want to save money (the creatures were cobbled together from war-
as it turned out11—enable neuroscientists to study the cerebral changes associated with
surplus items and bits of old alarm clocks), but he was determined to wield Occam’s
thinking.12
razor. That is, he aimed to posit as simple a mechanism as possible to explain
In his youth, Grey Walter also studied conditioning with a team of Ivan Pavlov’s apparently complex behaviour.
students visiting from St. Petersburg. Indeed, he met Pavlov briefly. But his prime
And simple, here, meant simple. His wheeled robots, or ‘tortoises’, had two valves, two
neurological interest was in the activity of the brain as a whole.
relays, two motors, two condensers, and one sensor (for light or for touch). In effect,
Besides these psycho-physiological skills, he was a skilled speaker and writer in several then, a Grey Walter tortoise had only two neurones. For, crucially, the tortoises weren’t
languages. He was much in demand to talk on both professional and political issues. mere toys but models of (very simple) nervous systems.
Initially a communist, he later veered towards anarchism: that is, the rejection of top-
Robot toys with simple tropisms were already common at the time, at public exhibitions
down control. But he was so full of ideas that, as his son Nicolas remembers, ‘he found
if not in the toyshops. For instance, a French-made ‘Philidog’ at the 1929 International
it difficult to produce more sustained work, and both of his two books were actually
Radio Exhibition in Paris would follow the light from an electric torch—until it was
written by his father from his notes and conversations’.13
brought too near to its nose, when it started to bark. 18 Ten years later, visitors to the
From 1949 onwards, Grey Walter built several intriguing cybernetic machines. These New York World Fair in 1939 were sadly robbed of their chance to be enchanted by
were intended to throw light on the behaviour of biological organisms—although he did another robot dog. It had committed suicide a few days earlier:
point out that they could be adapted for use as ‘a better “self-directing missile”’. 14
[The ‘electrical dog’] was to be sensitive to heat and was to have attacked
Unlike actual missiles, however, his machines displayed a range of different behaviours.
visitors and bitten their calves, but just before the opening of the exhibition
He’d been inspired, in part, by a wartime conversation with Craik. Craik was then it died, the victim of its own sensitivity. Through an open door it perceived
working on scanning and gun aiming, and visited Grey Walter at the Burden Institute to the lights of a passing car and rushed headlong towards it and was run
use some of his state-of-the-art electronic equipment. During his visit he suggested over, despite the efforts of the driver to avoid it. 19
that the EEG might be a cortical scanner, affected by sensory stimuli. This idea became
Great fun—except perhaps for the dog! But nothing to do with neuroscience. Grey
influential in neuroscientific circles.15 And it was later modelled by Grey Walter as a
Walter, by contrast, was pioneering biologically-based robotics, an activity taken up
rotating photoelectric cell, whose ‘scanning’ stopped when its robot carrier locked onto
many years later by (among others) Michael Arbib, Valentino Braitenberg, Rodney
a light source.
Brooks, Randall Beer, and Barbara Webb.20
Wiener’s influence on him was less effective. Thus in a letter to Adrian written in June
One of his tortoises, the Machina speculatrix showed surprisingly llifelike behaviour.
1947 (after Craik’s early death), Grey Walter said:
‘Lifelike’ rather than (human) mindlike—the Latin word meant exploration, not
We had a visit yesterday from a Professor Wiener, from Boston. I met him speculation. But Grey Walter clearly had his sights on psychology as well as physiology.
over there last winter and found his views somewhat difficult to absorb, but This was the first step in a research programme aimed at building a model having:
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This was the first step in a research programme aimed at building a model having: by another, perhaps a weaker, light. As Grey Walter put it (in deliberately biological
language), the tortoise showed a positive tropism to moderate light, but negative
these or some measure of these attributes: exploration, curiosity, free-will
tropisms with respect to both strong lights and darkness.
in the sense of unpredictability, goal-seeking, self-regulation, avoidance of
dilemmas, foresight, memory, learning, forgetting, association of ideas, Besides these basic tropisms, Grey Walter’s robot displayed simple forms of approach
form recognition, and the elements of social accommodation. 21 and avoidance. Its (slightly moveable) ‘shell’ acted as a 3-dimensional whisker, or
pressure sensor: it closed an electrical circuit whenever it encountered a mechanical
‘Avoidance of dilemmas and ‘free-will’ were supposedly modelled by the tortoise’s
obstacle, causing the creature to back away from walls, furniture, or people’s fingers.
ability to choose between two equally attractive light sources.22 Unlike Buridan’s ass,
Since the robot also carried a pilot light, it would approach its own image in a mirror,
forever poised between two identical bundles of hay, the tortoise would unknowingly
or another light-bearing tortoise. On touching the mirror, or the mate, it would
exploit its scanning mechanism to notice, and so to follow, one light before the other.
automatically move away—only to be drawn back again by the other’s pilot light. The
‘Learning’, ‘association of ideas’, and ‘social accommodation’ came later (see below).
mechanical minuet that resulted was, for a while, fascinating to watch.
Meanwhile, the Latin tag being too much of a mouthful, this early tortoise was quickly
named ELSIE (from Electro-mechanical robot, Light-Sensitive with Internal and External Another cybernetic device designed (in 1950) by Grey Walter was an electrical learning
stability). The prototype, which was very similar, was dubbed ELMER: ELectro- circuit named CORA (‘Conditioned Reflex Analogue’), now kept in London’s Science
MEchanical Robot. Museum. Largely ‘cannibalized’ from ELSIE, this functioned only as a static box on the
workbench. It wasn’t incorporated by Grey Walter himself into a mobile tortoise,
ELSIE soon became something of a celebrity. Much as Jacques de Vaucanson’s flute
although there’s some evidence that he’d intended to do so.
player had delighted visitors to London’s Haymarket two hundred years before,23 so
ELSIE amazed visitors to the Festival of Britain held—only a couple of miles away—in That may explain why ‘in spite of his efforts, CORA had only a small fraction of the
1951. A few years later, it caused great amusement at a meeting of Charles’ Babbage’s impact of the tortoises, and made little lasting impression’. 27 This shouldn’t have
brainchild, the British Association for the Advancement of Science. For it displayed an mattered, at least outside the exhibition halls. For, quite apart from its theoretical
unseemly fascination with women’s legs, presumably because of the light reflected interest, Grey Walter did connect it to the circuitry of a moving tortoise, so presumably
from their nylon stockings.24 (Much later, it was resurrected at the Science Museum for was able to demonstrate learning in action. But the rhetorical effect was less dramatic,
the Millennium Exhibition, and for the centenary of the British Psychological Society in and even the scientists failed to see the point.
2001).
The ‘point’, here, was Pavlovian. CORA was based in neurophysiology, being a
Members of the public unable to reach the Festival site were soon able to read about development of an earlier circuit named NERISSA (Nerve Excitation, Inhibition, and
ELSIE in a pot-boiler entitled The Robots Are Amongst Us. 25 A more serious account— Synaptic Analogue). It was intended as a model of the sort of conditioning that
but including a photograph of ELSIE and her infant human ‘brother’ in Grey Walter’s Pavlov28 had reported in his bell-salivating dogs—and which had fascinated Grey Walter
living room—had already come off the press in France, and appeared in English in in his Cambridge days.
1956.26 Grey Walter himself became something of a celebrity too. He was often invited
If CORA was repeatedly presented with two stimuli in quick succession, only the second
to speak by the BBC, sometimes appearing as a panellist on the popular radio
of which ‘naturally’ caused a particular response, it would eventually produce that
programme The Brains Trust.
response even when the first stimulus occurred alone. Like Pavlov’s dogs, CORA
Of Wheels and Whiskers needed occasional reinforcement (wherein the first stimulus is again followed by the
second) in order to maintain the conditioning. It was based on a probabilistic theory,
The Festival robot ELSIE explored its environment. It used a scanning photelectric cell
and may have owed something to Grey Walter’s fellow Ratio member, Albert Uttley.29
(coupled to the steering wheels) to seek light and to guide the wheels towards the
In short, CORA reflected current views on neural communication and learning—and it
illumination. If the light wasn’t too bright, the tortoise would stay in front of it,
was described by Grey Walter in his account of the living brain.30
oscillating very slightly to left and right. But a strong light would cause the creature to
continue scanning. In that case, its attention—and its movement—might be attracted Grey Walter pointed out that CORA could be combined with machina speculatrix to
by another, perhaps a weaker, light. As Grey Walter put it (in deliberately biological produce a robot capable of learning: machina docilis. A tortoise equipped with CORA
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produce a robot capable of learning: machina docilis. A tortoise equipped with CORA The ‘tropisms’ of machina speculatrix, for instance, emerged from a few core rules
and an auditory sensor would learn to approach at the call of a whistle, if the whistle linking the speeds of the two motors to the level of illumination. In the dark, the drive
was repeatedly blown just before a flash of light. Similarly, it would learn to move motor would run at half-speed and the steering motor at full speed. In a moderate
away from its current position when ‘whistled’, if the whistle had often been blown just light, the drive motor would run at full speed while the steering motor was switched
before it touched an obstacle. One follower of Grey Walter built tortoises, called off. And in strong illumination, the drive motor and steering motor would run at full and
machina reproducatrix, sensitive to various combinations of lamp, flute, and whistle. 31 half speeds, respectively. These simple mechanisms gave rise to a wide range of
observable behaviour.
Significantly, Grey Walter noted that his model of associative learning could ‘respond to
a part of the significant association as if the whole were present’.32 This, he said, was Even more to the point, in an unpublished manuscript of about 1961, Grey Walter
‘essentially the same process’ as pattern recognition—what McCulloch 33 had called described a complete behaviour—finding the way past an obstacle to reach a light
knowledge of universals. He didn’t say, because he couldn’t know, that part-to-whole source—as being achieved by four reflex ‘behaviour patterns’, some of which were
generalization would be hailed thirty years later as one of the triumphs of parallel ‘prepotent’ over others.39 The four basic patterns envisaged were exploration, positive
distributed processing.34 Grey Walter’s last reported device, built in about 1953 and and negative phototropisms, and obstacle avoidance. His analysis, in this case, was
shown to the Ratio Club in 1955, was called IRMA: Innate Releasing Mechanism equivalent to that used in the ‘subsumption architecture’ of modern behaviour-based
Analogue. 35 As the name implies, this was designed to model the ethologists’ notion of robotics.40
an IRM: an innate propensity to respond in a specific way to a specific stimulus. In
The Perils of Popularity
developing IRMA, Grey Walter was especially interested in stimuli originating in the
action of some other robot, so that the activity of two (or more) creatures could be During Grey Walter’s lifetime, his tortoises—like Vaucanson’s flute player, which in fact
coordinated in adaptive ways. Again, this robotic research would be largely forgotten, had also been theoretically motivated41—were commonly dismissed by professional
only to be taken up several decades later. 36 scientists as mere robotic ‘toys’. That remained true for nearly thirty years. During all
that time, the general verdict was that they were superficially engaging gizmos, of little
If IRMA was the last device to be built by Grey Walter, it wasn’t the last to be
scientific interest.
envisaged by him. Near the end of his working life (his research ceased when he was
seriously injured in 1970), he remarked on ‘a new era’ made possible by transistor This largely negative reception was due partly to the vulgar publicity they’d attracted in
technology: the mass media around 1950. The brou-ha-ha surrounding the tortoises put off even
some of Grey Walter’s fellow Ratio members, who were better placed than anyone to
We are now envisaging the construction of a creature which instead of
appreciate their significance.
looking as the original did, like a rather large and clumsy tortoise,
resembles more closely a small eager, active and rather intelligent beetle. He wasn’t the last to endure the counterproductive effects of seemingly favourable
There seems to be no limit to which this miniaturisation could go. Already publicity. The connectionist psychologist Frank Rosenblatt would do so too, only a few
designers are thinking in terms of circuits in which the actual scale of the years later, when his media-applauded work on ‘perceptrons’ 42 was savagely criticized
active elements will not be much larger, perhaps even smaller, than the by two devotees of symbolic AI. 43 And symbolic AI, in turn, would suffer similarly in
nerve cells of the living brain itself. This opens a truly fantastic vista of the early 1970s.44
exploration and high adventure… 37
But excessive media attention wasn’t the only obstacle. As remarked above, Grey
Grey Walter’s intriguing tortoises, despite their valve technology and clumsiness, were Walter himself never provided an extended account of his tortoises’ theoretical
early versions of what would much later be called Vehicles, 38 autonomous agents, implications. Having his father draft his books from his notes and conversations simply
situated robots, or animats. They illustrated the emergence of relatively complex motor wasn’t enough to engage his peers’ respect. Were it not for the end-of-century work in
behaviour—analogous to positive and negative tropisms, goal seeking, perception, situated robotics and computational ethology, his light in cognitive science today would
learning, and even sociability—out of simple responses guided and stabilized by be very much dimmer than it is.
negative feedback.
In fact, his anticipatory work is now sometimes praised as the pioneering effort in ‘Real
Artificial Life’.45 One might quibble about the laudatory definite article. For his fellow
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Artificial Life’.45 One might quibble about the laudatory definite article. For his fellow
Ratio-member William Ross Ashby, inventor of the—much less entertaining—Homeostat De Latil, P. (1953), La Pensee Artificielle (Paris: Gallimard), 1953. (Trans. Y. M. Golla as Thinking by

machine, arguably has an equal right to the accolade. That, however, is a different Machine: A Study of Cybernetics. (London: Sidgwick and Jackson), 1956.)

story.46 What’s not deniable is that Grey Walter’s engaging little tortoises had a serious
scientific purpose that’s widely recognized today. 47 Dreyfus, H. L. (1972), What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (New York: Harper &
Row).

Image Credits
Grey Walter, W. (1950a), ‘An Electro-Mechanical Animal’, Discovery,

Images appear courtesy of University of the West of England, Bristol March, 90-95.

Grey Walter, W. (1950b), ‘An Imitation of Life’, Scientific American,


References 182 (5): 42-45.

Adrian, E. D. (1936), ‘The Electrical Activity of the Cortex’,


Grey Walter, W. (1953), The Living Brain (London: Duckworth).
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 29: 197-200.

Grey Walter, W. (1956), ‘The Imitation of Mentality’, Proceedings of the Royal Institution, 36: 365-9.
Angyan, A. J. (1959), ‘Machina Reproducatrix’, in Blake and Uttley
1959, vol. 2: 933-944.
Grey Walter, W. (c. 1968), ‘The Future of Machina Speculatrix’. Unpublished ms., in the Burden
Neurological Institute archives.
Barlow, H. B. (1959), ‘Sensory Mechanisms, the Reduction of Redundancy, and Intelligence’, in D. V.
Blake and A. M. Uttley (eds.),
Hayward, R. (2001), ‘The Tortoise and the Love-Machine: Grey
The Mechanization of Thought Processes, Proceedings of a Symposium held at the National Physical
Walter and the Politics of Electro-Encephalography’, in C. Borck and M. Hagner (eds.), Mindful
Laboratory on 24-27 November 1958 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office), vol. 2: 535-539.
Practices: On the Neurosciences in the Twentieth Century. Special volume of Science in Context,
14: 615-641.
Boden, M. A. (2006), Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science
(Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Holland, O. (1997), ‘Grey Walter: The Pioneer of Real Artificial Life’,
in C. G. Langton and K. Shimohara (eds.), Artificial Life V: Proceedings of the Fifth International
Braitenberg, V. (1984), Vehicles: Essays in Synthetic Psychology
Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press), 34-41.
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).

Holland, O. (2002), ‘Grey Walter: The Imitator of Life’, in R. Damper and D. Cliff (eds.), Biologically-
Brooks, R. A. (1986), ‘A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot’, Institute of Electronics
Inspired Robotics: The Legacy of W. Grey Walter, Proceedings of the EPSRC/BBSRC International
and Electrical Engineers Journal of Robotics and Automation, 2: 14-23.
Workshop WGW-02, 32-48.
Revised version: ‘Exploration and High Adventure: The Legacy of Grey Walter’, Philosophical
Brooks, R. A. (1991a), ‘Intelligence Without Representation’,
Transactions of the Royal Society of London A, 361 (2003): 2085-2121. (Special issue on ‘Biologically
Artificial Intelligence, 47: 139-159. (First published as an MIT AI-Memo in 1987.)
Inspired Robotics’.)

Brooks, R. A. (1991b), ‘Intelligence Without Reason’, Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint
Minsky, M. L., and Papert, S. A. (1969), Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry
Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Sydney, 1-27.
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).

Craik, K. J. W. (1943), The Nature of Explanation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).


Pavlov, I. P. (1897/1902), The Work of the Digestive Glands: Lectures by J. P. Pawlow, trans. W. H.
Thompson (London: Charles Griffin), 1902. First published in Russian in 1897.
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Thompson (London: Charles Griffin), 1902. First published in Russian in 1897. 1 Wiener 1948

2 P. Husbands, p.c.
Pavlov, I. P. (1923/1927), Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the
Cerebral Cortex, trans. G. V. Anrep (London: Humphrey Milford), 1927. First published in Russian in 3 Craik 1943; Boden 2006: 4.vi
1923.
4 Boden 2006: 3.v.d

Rosenblatt, F. (1958), ‘The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization 5 For a discussion of the neuroscientists and psychologists involved, see Boden 2006:
in the Brain’, Psychological Review, 65: 386-408. 12.ii.c.

Rosenblatt, F. (1962), Principles of Neurodynamics: Perceptrons and the Theory of Brain Mechanisms 6 Boden 2006: 2.viii.e and 13.ix.d
(Washington, DC: Spartan).
7 Barlow 1959; Boden 2006: 12.ii

Stehl, R. (1955), The Robots Are Amongst Us (London: Arco). 8 Boden 2006: 14.iii.c

9 P. Husbands, p.c.
Uttley, A. M. (1954), ‘The Classification of Signals in the Nervous System’, EEG and Clinical
Neurophysiology, 6: 479-494. 10 see Boden 2006: 14.vii and 15.vii-viii.a

11 Boden 2006: 14.x.c


Uttley, A. M. (1956), ‘Conditional Probability Machines and Conditioned Reflexes’, in C. E. Shannon and
J. McCarthy (eds.), 12 Adrian 1936: 199
Automata Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 253-275.
13 N. Walter 1990

Vaucanson, J. de (1738/1742), An Account of the Mechanism of an Automaton or Image Playing on


14 Grey Walter 1950a,b, 1953; see also Holland 1997, 2002
the German Flute. Trans., with a letter to the Abbe de Fontaine, J. T. Desaguliers (London: Parker).
French original, Paris: Guerin, 1738. Facsimile reprints of both from Buren: Fritz Knuf, 1979. 15 Boden 2006: 13.ii.a

16 Holland 2002: 36
Walter, N. (1990), ‘Personal Notes for the Dictionary of National Biography’.
(Copy given to MAB by Owen Holland.) 17 Wiener 1947

18 De Latil 1953: 240f


Weizenbaum, J. (1976), Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (San
Francisco: Freeman). 19 De Latil 1953: 241

Wiener, N. (1947), Letter to Grey Walter, 12th June. (Copy given to MAB by
20 Boden 2006: 13.iii.b, 14.vii.c, and 15.vii

Owen Holland.)
21 Grey Walter 1953: 120f

Wiener, N. (1948), Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine 22 Holland 2002: 44f.
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press). Printed offset from the 1948 French
23 Boden 2006: 2.iv.a
edition (Paris: Hermann et Cie).
24 Hayward 2001
Notes
25 Stehl 1955

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The Rutherford Journal - The New Zealand Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology 10-08-13 21:43

26 De Latil 1953

27 Holland 2002: 46

28 Pavlov 1897/1902, 1923/1927

29 Uttley 1954, 1956; Boden 2006: 12.ii.c and 13.ii.b

30 Grey Walter 1953: 203-7

31 Angyan 1959

32 Grey Walter 1956: 368

33 Pitts and McCulloch 1947

34 Boden 2006: 12.vi

35 Grey Walter 1956: 367f.

36 Boden 2006: 13.iii.e

37 Grey Walter c. 1968: 7

38 Braitenberg 1984

39 Holland, p.c.

40 Brooks 1986, 1991a,b

41 Vaucanson 1738/1742; Boden 2006: 2.iv

42 Rosenblatt 1958, 1962

43 Minsky and Papert 1969; Boden 2006: 12.iii

44 Dreyfus 1972; Weizenbaum 1976; Boden 2006: 11.iv

45 Holland 1997

46 Boden 2006: 4.viii.c-d and 15.xi.a

47 This paper is based on Chapter 4.viii.a-b of my book Mind as Machine: A History of


Cognitive Science Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

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