What is an artificial neural network?

Technology continues to advance at impressive rates. And while the novelty of technologies such as self-parking cars and robotic vacuums have worn off, we are still many years away from the age of computers capable of human thought. Well, that was true before the development of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), of course. ANN is one of the only techniques currently available for training machines to truly think like people, and it is a tool used within the deep learning space. Artificial intelligence, defined broadly, is the field of training machines to autonomously perform tasks normally thought to require intelligence. Beneath that umbrella is machine learning, in which machines autonomously learn new tasks, and deep learning is a further subcategory of machine learning.