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Chronology 1942 Science fiction author Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics appear in the short story “Runaround.” 1943 Mathematician Emil Post writes about “production systems,” a concept borrowed for the General Problem Solver of 1957. 1943 Publication of Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts’ paper on a computational the- ory of neural networks, entitled “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas of Immanent in Nervous Activity.” 1944 John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, and How- ard Aiken form the Teleological Society to study, among other things, communi- cation and control in the nervous system. 1945 George Polya highlights the value of heuristic reasoning as a means of solving problems in his book How to Solve It. 1946 The first of ten Macy Conferences on Cybernetics begins in New York City. The theme of the first meeting is “Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems.” 1948 Publication of Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by mathematician Norbert Wiener. 1949 Psychologist Donald Hebb proposes an explanation for neural adaptation in human education in The Organization of Behavior: “neurons that fire together wire together.” 1949 Publication of Giant Brains, or Machines That Think by mathematician Edmund Berkeley.