The "laws of thought" depend not only on the property of brain cells, but also on how they are connected. And these connections are established not b… - Marvin Minsky

It would seem that Perceptrons has much the same role as The Necronomicon -- that is, often cited but never read.

More concretely, we would call the student's atten­tion to the following considerations: 1. Multilayer machines with loops clearly open all the questions of the general theory of automata. 2. A system with no loops but with an order restriction at each layer can compute only predicates of finite order. 3. On the other hand, if there is no restriction except for the absence of loops, the monster of vacuous generality once more raises its head. The perceptron has shown itself worthy of study despite (and even because of!) its severe limitations. It has many features to attract attention: its linearity; its intriguing learning theorem; its clear paradigmatic simplicity as a kind of parallel computation. There is no reason to suppose that any of these virtues carry over to the many-layered version. Nevertheless, we consider it to be an important research problem to elucidate (or reject) our intuitive judgment that the extension is sterile. Per­haps some powerful convergence theorem will be discovered, or some profound reason for the failure to produce an interesting “learning theorem” for the multilayered machine will be found.

In today's computer science curricula … almost all their time is devoted to formal classification of syntactic language types, defeatist unsolvability theories, folklore about systems programming, and generally trivial fragments of "optimization of logic design" — the latter often in situations where the art of heuristic programming has far outreached the special-case "theories" so grimly taught and tested — and invocations about programming style almost sure to be outmoded before the student graduates.