In a military trial of early perceptrons, the system performed well at distinguishing pictures containing tanks from those without, but this success was later revealed to be spurious—all tank pictures had been taken during the day while non-tank pictures were taken at night, so the perceptron was merely detecting lighting conditions rather than recognizing tanks.
factualpending
Speaker
Stephen WolframEvidence Quote
“a famous glitch was there was some uh trial for the military of these of these things where there were a bunch of pictures of tanks which had tanks in them and other pictures that didn't have tanks in them. And uh you know the the perceptron did really well figuring out which pictures had tanks in in in them. But then somebody realized that all the pictures with tanks were taken during the day and the pictures without tanks were taken at night.”
Source
The AI Expert: "Super AI Will Be Unstoppable!" – What’s Coming NEXT | Stephen Wolfram— Sean KimCreated: 8/11/2026, 5:31:42 AM
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