Electronic Computer Project (ECP)

Starting in late 1945, John von Neumann, Professor in the School of Mathematics, and a group of engineers worked at the Institute to design, build, and program an electronic digital computer—the physical realization of Alan Turing’s Universal Machine, theoretically conceived in 1936. In the words of George Dyson, author of Turing's Cathedral, the stored-program computer broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things.

In the cognitive revolution, psychologists, recognizing that developments in information processing had potential for studying the human mind, sought for the first time to apply new ideas in early artificial intelligence, computer science, and neuroscience to psychology. The Institute, as the home of one of the first modern computers, was uniquely poised to serve as a hub for this nascent field of study.