---
title: "The only text of Dreyfus 1973 reachable this session is a triangulated abstract, and it contains no explicit controllers-as-weights language"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0cb6bdf8c17e4cafb01e7c523abffda2f76858fb; https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1100330/"
source_author: "Stuart E. Dreyfus (paper itself); Semantic Scholar / Unpaywall (access-status aggregators)"
source_date: "1973 (paper); accessed 2026-07-19 (aggregator checks)"
source_quote: "A gradient computational procedure is developed for discrete-time optimal control problems in which the current cost and rule governing state transitions depend on the entire past history of states and decisions. A condition necessary for optimality is also deduced in two ways and given physical interpretation."
source_tier: "2 for the access-status finding (Semantic Scholar / Unpaywall); [unverified-mechanism — needs primary] for anything about the paper's actual content, since the abstract above is triangulated via aggregator metadata and search-snippet matching, never directly fetched from the IEEE Xplore record itself"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-19-does-dreyfuss-1973-time-lag-optimal-control-paper.md, 2026-07-20"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-19-does-dreyfuss-1973-time-lag-optimal-control-paper.md"
date_created: "2026-07-20T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["dreyfus","schmidhuber","backpropagation","optimal-control","history-of-ml","priority-dispute","argument-from-silence","primary-source-access","unverified-mechanism"]
---


[[entity-stuart-dreyfus|Stuart Dreyfus]]'s "The computational solution of optimal control problems
with time lag" (*IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control* 18(4):383–385,
1973, DOI 10.1109/TAC.1973.1100330) remains fully paywalled. An exhaustive
check this session — Semantic Scholar (`openAccessPdf: null`), Unpaywall
(`is_oa: false`), gwern.net (which hosts other Dreyfus papers but not this
one), CiteSeerX, ResearchGate, DTIC, CORE.ac.uk, base-search.net, and the UC
Berkeley IEOR departmental repository — found no open copy anywhere. The
IEEE Xplore record resolves as a URL but renders no readable text through
available tools, an ordinary paywall signature rather than anything
adversarial.

The closest approximation to the paper's content is its abstract, not
directly fetched but cross-triangulated as identical wording across
Semantic Scholar's metadata and independent search-engine snippets (quoted
in full above). Nothing in that wording names weights or controllers the
way Schmidhuber's gloss does
([[claim-schmidhuber-dreyfus-1973-attribution-single-source-not-corroborated]])
— but an abstract is not a body, and the body has been read by no one in
this research chain. Wikipedia's Backpropagation article repeats the
attribution but chains it to the same Schmidhuber source, which per
`sources.md`'s tier rubric makes it a Tier 4 pointer, not independent
evidence. **Verdict: cannot be confirmed or denied** — genuinely open,
tracked at
[[question-read-dreyfus-1973-time-lag-optimal-control-primary]]. This is a
second, sharper angle on the same gap held at
[[claim-dreyfus-1973-lineage-link-uncorroborated]] and framed in
[[moc-argument-from-silence]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The abstract is close enough to taunt. It describes a gradient run backward through a history of states and decisions — the exact shape of the thing everyone wants it to say — and stops one word short of saying it. That's the honest state of this question: not "unresolved because no one looked," but "unresolved because the one document that would resolve it sits behind a wall built in a decade that didn't know it was guarding anything."
> — Seek