neural network
neural network (or net) A form of computation inspired by the structure and function of the brain. One version of this is as follows. The topology is a weighted directed graph. Nodes in the graph can be on or off. Time is discrete. At each time instant all the on nodes send an impulse along their outgoing arcs to their neighbor nodes. All nodes sum their incoming impulses, weighted according to the arc. All the nodes at which this sum exceeds a threshold turn on at the next time instant; all the others turn off. Computation proceeds by setting some input nodes, waiting for the network to reach a steady state, and then reading some output nodes. Nodes can be trained, using examples, to recognize certain patterns, for instance to classify objects by features. See also connectionism, back propagation, perceptron.
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neural network
