Review of The Development of an Artificial Intelligence System for Inventory Management Using Multiple Experts

The expanded edition of Perceptrons (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1988, 292 pp , $12.50) by Marvin L. Minsky and Seymour A. Papert comes at a time of unprecedented interest in the biological and technological modeling of neural networks. One need only to refer to the August 1988 issue of AI Expert and Philip Chapnick’s editorial noting that more than 50 percent of the Fortune 500 companies are investigating neural network technologies. The one-year-old International Neural Network Society (INNS) already has over 3500 members from 38 countries and 49 U.S. states, with members joining at the rate of more than 200 per month. The American Association for Artificial Intelligence was, in fact, a cooperating society at the INNS First Annual Meeting in Boston on 6-10 September 1988. Hardly a week goes by in which a scientific meeting or special journal issue does not feature recent neural network research. Thus, substantive technical reviews or informed general assessments of the broad sweep of neural network research are most welcome to help interested scientists find their way into this rapidly evolving technology. This fact is especially true because it is the cumulative impact over the past two decades of many scientific discoveries across several scientific and engineering disciplines that has triggered the current explosion of interest in the neural network field. Unfortunately, neither Minsky nor Papert has participated in any of the many scientific developments that have taken place within the field of neural networks since the first edition of their influential book was published in 1969. In preparing their expanded edition, they have approached the field as outsiders. Book Reviews