[2] He co-founded HNC Software Inc. (NASDAQ: HNCS) in 1986 which went on to develop the pervasive card fraud detection system, Falcon®.
Hecht-Nielsen was born in San Francisco, California to a Danish immigrant father and an American mother.
He posits that all actions and thoughts begin as the "winners" of competitions, where confabulations are tested for cogency based on antecedent support.
He presented some mathematical models of the proposed mechanism, and some experimental results where software using this system was able to add several words to a stub of a sentence, keeping that stub coherent and, optionally, maintaining some connection to a full input sentence supplied as context.
He made red, green, and blue-striped medallions to commemorate the event, and had them distributed to the audience along with pamphlets explaining their significance: "This new era, which as yet has no name, will be characterized by the eternal universal freedom from want provided by intelligent machines."