Robotics and Artificial Intelligence

Neural networks are a computational approach which is based on a large collection of neural units loosely modelling the way a biological brain solves problems with large clusters of biological neurons connected by axons. Each neural unit is connected with many others, and links can be enforcing or inhibitory in their effect on the activation state of connected neural units. Each individual neural unit may have a summation function which combines the values of all its inputs together. The goal of the neural network is to solve problems in the same way that the human brain would, although several neural networks are much more abstract. Modern neural network projects typically work with a few thousand to a few million neural units and millions of connections, which is still several orders of magnitude less complex than the human brain and closer to the computing power of a worm.

New brain research often stimulates new patterns in neural networks. One new approach is using connections which span much further and link processing layers rather than always being localized to adjacent neurons