Artificial Intelligence - From Its Origins To Commercial Uses

Artificial intelligence is currently the fastest growing field of computer science, arousing as much interest as concern. Although AI has been in the news for quite some time, the first perceptron, i.e. the simplest neural network model, was created as early as in 1957!

Less than 30 years later, in 1987, to be exact, D.E. Rumelhart, G.E, Hinton and R.J. Williams developed a multilayer perceptron model. The three gentlemen were the first to describe a then novel procedure for educating neural networks using a back propagation algorithm to train multilayer neural networks. Their concept itself included an additional "hidden layer" of "connection weights of processing elements", and the described learning algorithm determined the direction in which the mentioned "weights" should be modified in a given iteration in order to reduce the error made by the network. A weight is nothing more than a coefficient (a fraction, i.e., a numerical quantity/ratio characterizing the