In this chapter, we introduced the most important concept in realizing intelligent machines, which is artificial neural networks. The ANNs are modeled against the biological brain. While the theory of ANN existed for decades, the advent of distributed computing power along with access to unprecedented volumes of data has enabled development in this exciting field of research.
In this chapter, we introduced the basic building blocks of the ANNs and simple techniques to train the models in order to generalize the model for producing outcomes for the new datasets.
This introduction is a building block for the next chapter, which will dive deeper into the implementation aspects of the neural networks.
