Hinton: teenage friend Inman Harvey's memory idea drove his neural network research for 60 years

DoctorJosh · x · 2026-11-03

University of Sussex announces the sudden death of Inman Harvey, a key figure in Artificial Life and the 1990s COGS school of new approaches to AI. In his tribute, Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton reveals they met at age seven: as teenagers, Harvey told him a memory might be distributed across many brain cells, each involved in storing many memories — an idea Hinton says drove his research for the next 60 years.

Related event: Hinton Mourns Inman Harvey, Cites Childhood Inspiration(2 posts)→

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