They've Got a Lot of Nerve

April 1996 / Reviews / Holes in the Neural Network / They've Got a Lot of Nerve

Neural networks are computer hardware/software problem-solving tools that were inspired by organic nervous systems. Their technological roots lie in the field of parallel distributed proc essing and the opportunities of massively parallel systems, as discovered in the late 1980s.
Conceptually, building a neural network--whether implemented in hardware, software, or both--is building a behavioral model. It requires either "hand-shaping" the model by setting the connections and their attenuation or automatically training it by processing large data sets. The latter process is also called modeling. You must then evaluate and often retrain or redesign the network t hat results until its predictive abilities fall within the desired range. Because the interactive train-and-evaluate cycle is potentially work-intensive, genetic programming is often used to automate the process (see "Genetic Programming with C++," February 1994 BYTE).

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Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it is theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.

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