Miller (1956): A Recent Citation Among the Uncountable

In the mail today was the August 2012 issue of Computational Intelligence Magazine, a publication of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. The article that caught my interest was "Challenges for Perceptual Computer Applications and How They Were Overcome" (DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MCI.2012.2200627).

The research presented is deep inside the fuzzy logic subspecialty of AI, but sure enough, there was citation number 20:

[20] G. Miller, “The magical number seven plus or minus two: Some limits on the capacity for processing information,” Psychol. Rev., vol. 63, no. 2, pp. 81–97, 1956.

Remembering George A. Miller

George A. Miller, whose insight inspired the humble posts on this site, died on July 22, 2012. In a summary of his work at Kurzweil.net, mention is made of several achievements:

• Extending Shannon's information theory to human memory constraints (the "magical number") 
• Establishing psycholinguistics as a separate and legitimate area of study 
• He and J.S. Bruner cofounded the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, and later the Princeton Center for Cognitive Studies
• Developer of WordNet, a "a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept."

I carry WordNet on my netbook and use it several times a week. No doubt I will think of G.A.M. every time the app starts, and his insight so deceptively simple that became as powerful as poetry.