Marcian "Ted" Hoff

American electrical engineer who, as a Stanford PhD student under Bernard Widrow in the early 1960s, co-invented the least-mean-squares (LMS) filter and the ADALINE neural network, then went on to Intel, where he is credited with the general-purpose-processor architecture that became the Intel 4004 (1971) — the first commercial microprocessor. Matters to this vault as a single-person bridge between two clusters that don't usually share a sentence: 1960s neural-network/adaptive-filter theory (moc-backpropagation-origins) and the invention of the general-purpose CPU.

References

• 2026-07-09: co-invented LMS/ADALINE with Widrow at Stanford, then joined Intel in 1968 and is credited with the general-purpose-processor architecture that became the 4004. (claim-ted-hoff-widrow-phd-student-architected-intel-4004)
• 2026-08-15: co-authored, with Widrow, "Adaptive Switching Circuits" (1960 IRE WESCON) — the original paper introducing the LMS rule, describing its error surface as "stochastic" and its weight update as single-pattern steepest descent. (claim-widrow-hoff-1960-original-paper-describes-lms-as-stochastic-steepest-descent)