Scientific papers: innovation … or imitation?

Scientific papers: innovation … or imitation?

Sometimes a paper comes out that has the seeds of a great idea that could lead to a whole new line of pioneering research. But, instead, nothing much happens, except imitative works that do not push the core idea forward at all. For example the McCulloch Pitts paper from 1943 showed how neural networks could represent arbitrary logical or Boolean expressions of a certain class. The paper was well-received at the time, brilliantly executed by co-…