Twelve years of real work

The excitement was real. The US Navy funded Rosenblatt directly. Researchers across the country started building on the idea, testing it, pushing it further. For a few years, it felt like something important had been found.

But the same problems kept coming up. The Perceptron handled simple shapes — but anything harder and it got stuck. No matter how long it trained, some problems just wouldn't budge. Researchers couldn't always explain why. They just kept running into the same wall.

Twelve years passed. By the late 1960s, the excitement had quietly started to fade.