摘

Clips

来源

The adder example demonstrates how a network of perceptrons can be used to simulate a circuit containing many NAND gates. And because NAND gates are universal for computation, it follows that perceptrons are also universal for computation.

The computational universality of perceptrons is simultaneously reassuring and disappointing. It's reassuring because it tells us that networks of perceptrons can be as powerful as any other computing device. But it's also disappointing, because it makes it seem as though perceptrons are merely a new type of NAND gate. That's hardly big news!

However, the situation is better than this view suggests. It turns out that we can devise learning algorithms which can automatically tune the weights and biases of a network of artificial neurons. This tuning happens in response to external stimuli, without direct intervention by a programmer. These learning algorithms enable us to use artificial neurons in a way which is radically different to conventional logic gates. Instead of explicitly laying out a circuit of NAND and other gates, our neural networks can simply learn to solve problems, sometimes problems where it would be extremely difficult to directly design a conventional circuit.