In the beginning of computer science, the fathers of computer science, John von Neumann, Alan Turing, were very, very interested in brains and in thinking as well as in computation and mathematics. The origins of computational neuroscience and the study of neurons and the creation of computers, these origins were very tightly intertwined.

In fact, in Turing’s original paper in 1948, which many people see as the dawn of computer science, he laid out two different approaches to computation. One of them was based on the serial execution of instructions one after the other. This is the Turing machine that everybody understands as the basis for the computer now.

He also talked about a different model for computation involving networks of artificial neurons that are connected together in a grid or in a graph, in an arbitrary relationship that allows data to flow through.

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