Intelligent Machinery
In a report for the National Physical Laboratory, Turing described unorganised machines that learn by changing their connections.
Why it matters
The idea of a network that starts random and is tuned by training is set out here a decade before the perceptron.
The laboratory's management thought little of the report and it sat unpublished for twenty years. The text already separates supervised from unsupervised learning, and discipline from initiative, and remarks on a machine that is raised rather than programmed.