A brief introduction to Neural Networks

What is a neural network?

A neural network is a set of parallel elements that emulates the behavior of a biological neural system.

If you find this website maybe you are an student so, you are in classes and your teacher of Programming introduces a new subject about Artificial Intelligence and neural networks. As you may think neural networks is a very complex topic. Before I go further with my explanation, I recommend you to read this theoretical topic about Neural Networks.

If you read the topic above you have noticed that, neural networks are quite difficult to understand, and you may thinking: Why do I need neural networks?, neural networks are very useful, especially when you want that a new program, or machine act like a human.

The function of a neural network is very simple:

You have a set inputs which usually are the data that you want to process, each input is multiplied by a weight (as figure shows).



All the results of the multiplication are added together thus we have and output. The output is filtered by an activation function.

Mainly this is the way of how neural networks works, but there are more complicated structures or architectures which I recommend to read them.

Most common applications of neural networks

• Robotics


• Pattern recognition


• Making Desition


• Voice Recognition