Off to college, now, then, and...?

摘要

Acouple of weeks ago, Pittsburgher Catherine Havasi packed most of her belongings into the family car and headed for her freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I know about Catherine because (1) her dad works where I do, (2) she won a $12 000 Family Scholarship from our company, and (3) she has a habit of winning science fairs. Year after year. The title of her winning science fair paper this year was "A System of Feedforward Neural Networks for the Improved Depix-elization of Enlarged Bitmap Images." That set me to thinking about when I started college 47 years ago. If this were 1952 instead of 1999, Catherine surely would have won a major scholarship and several science fairs. But her paper would not have been called "A System of Feedforward Neural Networks for the Improved Depixelization of Enlarged Bitmap Images." In 1952, feedforward neural networks existed only in the brain. There were no bitmaps of any kind, let alone enlarged ones. And "improved depixelization" meant a better way to exorcise fairies, elves, and pixies.