McCulloch-Pitts neuron

from The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)

McCulloch-Pitts neuron

   <artificial intelligence> The basic building block of
   {artificial neural networks}.  It receives one or more inputs
   and produces one or more identical outputs, each of which is a
   simple non-linear function of the sum of the inputs to the
   neuron.  The non-linear function is typically a threshhold or
   step function which is usually smoothed (i.e. a {sigmoid}) to
   facilitate {learning}.

   (1997-10-11)