PSPDP Bulletin Board:

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Background

In the 1984-85 academic year, preprints of the 2-volume Parallel Distributed
Processing by Jay McClelland, Dave Rumelhart and the PDP Research Group (MIT
Press, 1986) were being circulated and discussed among cognitive scientists. In Fall
1984, Jay McClelland moved from the University of California, San Diego (where the
PDP books were mainly written) to the Psychology Department of Carnegie-Mellon
University. A number of other prominent connectionists also joined the CMU faculty
about the same time. This set up an intellectual convergence (perhaps more aptly,
collision) between the new PDP movement and leading proponents of production
system architectures for symbolic processing who were already on the CMU faculty
(e.g., John Anderson, Allan Newell and Herbert Simon).

Walter Schneider and I were visitors at CMU during that exciting year. We co-
organized a one-time seminar to promote discussion of alternative architectures
of cognition. This event was held in the CMU Department of Psychology, Baker
Hall 336B, on Friday April 12, 1985, 3:30-5:30pm. Over the preceding week and
a half, many people posted their thoughts on an online forum, which became
known as the "PSPDP Bulletin Board" ("Production Systems and Parallel Distributed
Processing"). The attached file was scanned from my own paper printout of that
discussion. It includes comments from (in order), Holyoak, John Anderson, Holyoak,
Walter Schneider, David Klahr, Jeff Shrager, Jay McClelland, Schneider, Anderson,
McClelland.

--Keith Holyoak (7/18/2012)

 

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