A Concise History of Neural Networks

The idea of neural networks began unsurprisingly as a model of how neurons in the brain function, termed'connectionism' and used connected circuits to simulate intelligent behaviour .In 1943, portrayed with a simple electrical circuit by neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch and mathematician Walter Pitts. Donald Hebb took the idea further in his book, The Organization of Behaviour (1949), proposing that neural pathways strengthen over each successive use, especially between neurons that tend to fire at the same time thus beginning the long journey towards quantifying the complex processes of the brain. In 1950s, as researchers began trying to translate these networks onto computational systems, the first Hebbian network was successfully implemented at MIT in 1954. Around this time, Frank Rosenblatt, a psychologist at Cornell, was working on understanding the comparatively simpler decision systems present in the eye of a fly, which underlie and determine the its flee response. In an attempt to understand and quantify this process, he proposed the idea of a Perceptron in 1958, calling it Mark I Perceptron.