<story><title>Building a simple neural net in Java</title><url>https://smalldata.tech/blog/2016/05/03/building-a-simple-neural-net-in-java</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjburgess</author><text>&amp;gt; A neural net is a software representation of how the brain works&lt;p&gt;A NN shares as much with the brain, as a decision tree does with a forest: nothing at all.&lt;p&gt;It would be preferable to completely dispense with any talk of the brain, and introduce it simply as a modified form of (high school) linear regression.&lt;p&gt;Any biological talk at this point is unhelpful mystification.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>timkam</author><text>One can perhaps say: &amp;quot;A neural net is a collection of machine learning approaches that are somewhat inspired by the human brain. However, neural nets have little to do with how the brain actually works.&amp;quot; I think this statement (or a similar, more accurate version) is actually useful, because the name &amp;quot;neural net&amp;quot; is somewhat deceiving.</text></comment>
<story><title>Building a simple neural net in Java</title><url>https://smalldata.tech/blog/2016/05/03/building-a-simple-neural-net-in-java</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjburgess</author><text>&amp;gt; A neural net is a software representation of how the brain works&lt;p&gt;A NN shares as much with the brain, as a decision tree does with a forest: nothing at all.&lt;p&gt;It would be preferable to completely dispense with any talk of the brain, and introduce it simply as a modified form of (high school) linear regression.&lt;p&gt;Any biological talk at this point is unhelpful mystification.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>curioushacking</author><text>I agree with you that the biological inspiration for a neural network is tenuous at best.  Especially the basic two-layer network outlined here.&lt;p&gt;However at least for visual perception, there is some scientific basis for convolutional neural networks having some properties to biological visual perception.  The work of Hubel and Wiesel demonstrated visual cortex activations that look very similar to the first layers of CNN kernels.&lt;p&gt;ref: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;knowingneurons.com&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;29&amp;#x2F;hubel-and-wiesel-the-neural-basis-of-visual-perception&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;knowingneurons.com&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;29&amp;#x2F;hubel-and-wiesel-the-n...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>