Connectionist Models

Consider humans: Neuron switching time ~ $.001$ second Number of neurons ~ $10^{10}$ Connections per neuron ~ $10^{4-5}$ Scene recognition time ~ $.1$ second 100 inference steps doesn't seem like enough [$\rightarrow$] much parallel computation

Properties of artificial neural nets (ANN's): Many neuron-like threshold switching units

Many weighted interconnections among units

Highly parallel, distributed process

Emphasis on tuning weights automatically