LeCun recalls 1986 MIT visit, showed Minsky a neural net multiplying binary numbers
ylecun · x · 2026-10-09
Yann LeCun, replying to Stephen Wolfram, shared a memory from June 1986: his first US conference and first visit to MIT, where he presented a poster on multilayer networks.
At a reception hosted by Thinking Machines Inc, he met Marvin Minsky for the first time. Minsky was surprised that a neural net could be trained to compute the product of two binary numbers — an experiment LeCun had done himself.
He was en route to the first Connectionist Summer School at CMU, and the Bell Labs team invited him to give a talk in Holmdel before returning to Paris.
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