In reading the Connectionist Foundations article, I found the most interesting part of the article to be the paragraph that explained how these networks show “grace degradation of their performance.” This seems like a really critical point to me – most programs that I’ve been acquainted with, just by using them or writing them, have a very specific problem domain. If you exceed it, or give the program something it’s not ready for, you only get an error message. Instead of a sudden drop-off in usefulness, the fact that they slowly become more ineffective is a remarkable phenomenon that deserves to be looked at closely – which suggests that we ought to consider Connectionist networks seriously.