| |
Introduction: The Substitution of Human Faculties with Technology: Early Tools |
 |
The development of modern technologies, led by men's curiosity and inquiring mind as well as the desire to facilitate work processes has a long and complex history.
Already in prehistoric times tools made of stone were developed to expand men's physical power. In the following millenniums simple mechanical devices and machines such as the wheel, the lever and the pulley were invented. The next step was the development of powered machines. For example, windmills, waterwheels and simple steam-driven devices.
|
|
Neural network
A bottom-up  artificial intelligence approach, a neural network is a network of many very simple processors ("units" or "neurons"), each possibly having a (small amount of) local memory. The units are connected by unidirectional communication channels ("connections"), which carry numeric data. The units operate only on their local data and on the inputs they receive via the connections. A neural network is a processing device, either an algorithm, or actual hardware, whose design was inspired by the design and functioning of animal brains and components thereof. Most neural networks have some sort of "training" rule whereby the weights of connections are adjusted on the basis of presented patterns. In other words, neural networks "learn" from examples and exhibit some structural capability for generalization.
|
|
|
