Amazingly, according to this 1981 interview in the New Yorker, Minsky&#x27;s first neural net was itself randomly wired!<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;1981&#x2F;12&#x2F;14&#x2F;a-i" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;1981&#x2F;12&#x2F;14&#x2F;a-i</a><p>&quot;Because of the random wiring, it had a sort of fail-safe characteristic. If one of the neurons wasn’t working, it wouldn’t make much of a difference—and, with nearly three hundred tubes and the thousands of connections we had soldered, there would usually be something wrong somewhere. In those days, even a radio set with twenty tubes tended to fail a lot. I don’t think we ever debugged our machine completely, but that didn’t matter. By having this crazy random design, it was almost sure to work, no matter how you built it.&quot;