from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
artificial neural network
neural nets
neural network
neuron
NN
<artificial intelligence> (ANN, commonly just "neural network"
or "neural net") A network of many very simple processors
("units" or "neurons"), each possibly having a (small amount
of) local memory. The units are connected by unidirectional
communication channels ("connections"), which carry numeric
(as opposed to symbolic) data. The units operate only on
their local data and on the inputs they receive via the
connections.
A neural network is a processing device, either an
{algorithm}, or actual hardware, whose design was inspired by
the design and functioning of animal brains and components
thereof.
Most neural networks have some sort of "training" rule whereby
the weights of connections are adjusted on the basis of
presented patterns. In other words, neural networks "learn"
from examples, just like children learn to recognise dogs from
examples of dogs, and exhibit some structural capability for
generalisation.
Neurons are often elementary non-linear signal processors (in
the limit they are simple threshold discriminators). Another
feature of NNs which distinguishes them from other computing
devices is a high degree of interconnection which allows a
high degree of parallelism. Further, there is no idle memory
containing data and programs, but rather each neuron is
pre-programmed and continuously active.
The term "neural net" should logically, but in common usage
never does, also include biological neural networks, whose
elementary structures are far more complicated than the
mathematical models used for ANNs.
See {Aspirin}, {Hopfield network}, {McCulloch-Pitts neuron}.
Usenet newsgroup: news:comp.ai.neural-nets.
(1997-10-13)
from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
nn
<tool, messaging> A {terminal based} program for reading
{Usenet} {news} by Kim F. Storm <[email protected]>, Texas
Instruments A/S, Denmark.
nn lets you decide which of the many {news groups} you are
interested in, and unsubscribe to those which don't interest
you. nn lets you select articles to read from a menu in each
of the groups you subscribe. nn sorts and presents new
articles very quickly because it uses its own local database
to maintain all the necessary information (this database is
built and maintained by the nnmaster program).
The {NNTP} support was designed and implemented by Ren'e
Seindal, Institute of Datalogy, University of Copenhagen,
Denmark.
E-mail: <[email protected]> (bugs, fixes, suggestions, etc.)
Usenet newgroup: news:news.software.nn.
(1995-12-04)