Textbook of AI

1926–2008, Computer scientist; pioneer of pattern recognition

Oliver Gordon Selfridge was a British-American computer scientist, sometimes called the "father of machine perception". His 1959 paper Pandemonium: A Paradigm for Learning proposed an architecture in which a population of simple feature-detecting "demons" shout in proportion to how strongly they detect their feature; higher-level "cognitive demons" combine these and a "decision demon" picks the loudest. The architecture is a clear ancestor of modern feed-forward neural networks and of the population-coding view of neural representation.

Selfridge attended the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, working at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory at the time, and was an organiser of the November 1958 Mechanisation of Thought Processes conference at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, sometimes called "the British Dartmouth" , where Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy presented early AI work to a UK audience. He spent later years at MIT, BBN and GTE Laboratories, and remained an influential figure in machine perception until his death.