Most of our future attempts to build large, growing Artificial Intelligences will be subject to all sorts of mental disorders. - Marvin Minsky

[We] became involved with a somewhat therapeutic compulsion: to dispel what we feared to be the first shadows of a “holistic” or “Gestalt” misconception that would threaten to haunt the fields of engineering and artificial intelligence as it had earlier haunted biology and psychology. For this, and for a variety of more practical and theoretical goals, we set out to find something about the range and limitations of perceptrons.

What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.

Most adults have some childlike fascination for making and arranging larger structures out of smaller ones.