Perceptron Simulation Experiments

An experimental simulation program, which has been in progress at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory since 1957, is described. This program uses the IBM 704 computer to simulate perceptual learning, recognition, and spontaneous classification of visual stimuli in the perceptron, a theoretical brain model which has been described elsewhere. The paper includes a brief review of the organization of simple perceptrons, and theoretically predicted performance curves are compared with those obtained from the simulation programs, in several types of experiments, designed to study "forced" and "spontaneous" learning of pattern discriminations.