A Brief History Of Neural Networks
Everyone is aware of the recent Deep Learning achievements. But Neural Networks have a long history starting 80 years ago.
This article is an extract from my book Data Science for Supply Chain Forecasting.
1940 Prehistory: Artificial Neurons
The history of artificial neurons dates back to the 1940s, when Warren McCulloch (a neuroscientist) and Walter Pitts (a logician) modeled the biological working of an organic neuron in a first artificial neuron to show how simple units could replicate logical functions.
1950 Artificial Neural Networks
Inspired by Warren McCulloch’s and Walter Pitts’ publication, Frank Rosenblatt (a research psychologist working at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory) worked in the 1950s on the Perceptron: a single layer of neurons able to classify pictures of a few hundred pixels. This can be seen as the first ancestor of modern neural networks.
The genius of Rosenblatt was to implement an algorithm to train the neurons based on a dataset. Rosenblatt inspired himself from the work of the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb, who theorized in his 1949 book Organization of Behavior that connections between (organic)…
