Norbert Wiener firing of anti-aircraft guns caused Wiener to investigate information theory independently of Claude Shannon and to invent the Wiener filter. (To him is due the now standard practice of modeling an information source as a random process—in other words, as a variety of noise.) His anti-aircraft work eventually led him to formulate cybernetics. After the war, his fame helped MIT to recruit a research team in cognitive science, composed of researchers in neuropsychology and the mathematics and biophysics of the nervous system, including Warren Sturgis McCulloch and Walter Pitts. These men later made pioneering contributions to computer science and artificial
William James Sidis of intelligence as "silly, pedantic, absurd, and grossly misleading". Regardless of the exaggerations, Sidis is judged by other high IQ peers such as MIT Physics professor Daniel Frost Comstock and notable American mathematician Norbert Wiener to have had real ability. Sidis' life and work, particularly his ideas about Native Americans, are extensively discussed in Robert M. Pirsig's book "" (1991). Sidis is also discussed in "Ex-Prodigy", an autobiography by mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), who was a prodigy himself and a contemporary of Sidis at Harvard. A Danish author Morten Brask wrote a fictional novel based on Sidis' life; "The Perfect