A Digestible Overview of Neural Networks

When you hear “the year 2250,” what thought pops into your head? It’s probably a world full of artificially intelligent machines re-enacting every possible scenario that science fiction has presented to us. Students in the 23rd century might study the history of artificial intelligence in a computer science course, scoffing at our nascent machine learning algorithms just as we scoff at the ENIAC. But just as the ENIAC — and many other Turing-complete machines — laid the foundation for supercomputers, neural networks are laying the groundwork for androids that can mimic Picasso’s artistic flair.

What are neural networks?

It’s common practise to conceptualize an artificial neural network(ANN) as a biological neuron. Technically speaking, an artificial neural network, as Ada Lovelace put it, is the “calculus of the nervous system.” A really, really simplified version of the nervous system. So much so that a few neuroscientists have probably lost sleep over the analogy.

A good way to visualize a neural network is not to think of biological neurons. Instead, imagine a car wash. When you take your grime-stained car to your local car wash, you’re…