Always Learning, Always Growing: How Neural Networks Do The Hard Work

Not that he was overly excited about it: Rosenblatt told The New Yorker that he thought the machine was "of no practical use." Sixty years later we can safely say Rosenblatt underestimated his invention. True to its name, the Mark 1 in fact marked the first artificial neural network. The way it worked, simply, was this: The Mark 1 Perceptron used 400 randomly connected photocells to "see" a triangle--that is, not just capture its image the way a camera might, but in fact to "recognize" it for future reference. Today, neural networks and neurocomputing have revolutionized artificial intelligence (AI) and made great advances in deep learning possible. Their use also extends into natural language processing, speech recognition and computer vision--the very purpose of the original Perceptron.