McCulloch-Pitts artificial neuron

Fig. 10.1 Schematic representations of (a) a biological neuron, and (b) a McCulloch-Pitts artificial neuron.

Fig. 9.5. The McCulloch-Pitts artificial neuron is a bi-state model which output depends on the sum of the weighted inputs. Networks built with this neuron can only solve problems whose solution is defined by a hyperplane.

The field of artificial neural networks is a new and rapidly growing field and, as such, is susceptible to problems with naming conventions. In this book, a perceptron is defined as a two-layer network of simple artificial neurons of the type described in Chapter 2. The term perceptron is sometimes used in the literature to refer to the artificial neurons themselves. Perceptrons have been around for decades (McCulloch Pitts, 1943) and were the basis of much theoretical and practical work, especially in the 1960s. Rosenblatt coined the term perceptron (Rosenblatt, 1958). Unfortunately little work was done with perceptrons for quite some time after it was realized that they could be used for only a restricted range of linearly separable problems (Minsky Papert, 1969). 

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) attempt to emulate their biological counterparts. McCulloch and Pitts (1943) proposed a simple model of a neuron, and Hebb (1949) described a technique which became known as Hebbian learning. Rosenblatt (1961), devised a single layer of neurons, called a Perceptron, that was used for optical pattern recognition. 

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