Ray Kurzweil said he visited Rosenblatt in 1962 when he was 14.

Judge the substance of the assertion: Kurzweil visited Frank Rosenblatt in 1962 and was 14 at the time. True: independent or contemporaneous records (biographies, interviews from earlier years, Cornell or Rosenblatt-related accounts) place the visit in 1962, and Kurzweil's documented birth date makes him 14 at that time. Mostly true: the visit is documented in 1962, but his age at the time works out to 13 rather than 14, or the year is off by one while the age is consistent. Mixed: the visit is corroborated, but both the year and the age are inconsistent. Mostly false: the visit is only loosely corroborated, or its date differs by several years. False: evidence shows no such visit occurred, for example Rosenblatt was unavailable or the meeting was impossible as described.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 the Kurzweil Library Kurzweil Library (talk transcript, Singularity group) · 2017 Own record

   “When I was 14 years-old in 1962 — I wrote the leaders of the 2 opposing schools in artificial intelligence (schools of thought).”

2. E2 The Machines Are Proving Ray Kurzweil Right—Sort Of The New Republic · 11 September 2024

   “appeared just as a 14-year old prodigy named Ray Kurzweil was teaching himself to build computers in his family home in Queens, New York.”

3. E3 The Playboy Interview With Ray Kurzweil Playboy · 3 September 2021

   “Raymond Kurzweil was born February 12, 1948, and he still carries the plain, nasal inflection of his native Queens, New York.”

4. E4 Touching the future. Singularity group talk (transcript hosted on the Kurzweil Library site) · 2017 Own record

   “When I was 14 years-old in 1962 — I wrote the leaders of the 2 opposing schools in artificial intelligence (schools of thought).”

5. E5 Touching the future. Singularity group talk (transcript hosted on the Kurzweil Library site) · 2017 Own record

   “But I went there — and he was publicizing a machine called the ‘perceptron.’ It was really the first popular neural net.”

6. E6 The Machines Are Proving Ray Kurzweil Right—Sort Of The New Republic · 11 September 2024

   “appeared just as a 14-year old prodigy named Ray Kurzweil was teaching himself to build computers in his family home in Queens, New York.”

7. E7 The Playboy Interview With Ray Kurzweil Playboy · 3 September 2021

   “Raymond Kurzweil was born February 12, 1948, and he still carries the plain, nasal inflection of his native Queens, New York.”

8. E8 Ray Kurzweil edwardbetts.com (monograph index quoting Chip Walter, Immortality, Inc.)

   “The inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, who is now an engineering director at Google, met Rosenblatt in his lab at Cornell in 1962.”

9. E9 The Evolution Revolution: Kurzweil in Debate | Worth Worth · 13 October 2023 Own record

   “went to meet the two leaders of the two principle schools, the symbolic school, which is Marvin Minsky, and the connectionist school, Frank Rosenblatt, who created the first neural net. This was in 1962 when I was 14.”

10. E10 Full text of "[ Ray Kurzweil] How To Create a Mind" archive.org Own record

    “In 1964, at the age of sixteen, I wrote to Frank Rosenblatt (1928-1971), a professor at Cornell University, inquiring about a machine called the Mark 1 Perceptron.”

11. E11 Ray Kurzweil edwardbetts.com (monograph index quoting Ray Kurzweil footnote in Eagleman and Brandt, The Runaway Species)

    “Raymond ‘Ray’ Kurzweil (1948–) is a serial inventor and entrepreneur whose past innovations include programmes which allow computers to recognize text and convert it to speech.”

An independent book source (E8, Chip Walter's Immortality, Inc.) reports that Kurzweil met Rosenblatt in his Cornell lab in 1962. Playboy (E3) gives Kurzweil's birth date as February 12, 1948, which makes him 14 for most of 1962, consistent with the claim and with his statements in E1 and E9. However, Kurzweil's own book How to Create a Mind (E10) says he wrote to Rosenblatt in 1964 at age sixteen, which sits uneasily with the 1962 date in his other accounts. The weight of the evidence supports a 1962 visit at age 14, but that inconsistency keeps this short of fully true.