The need for neural networks

Neural networks have been around for many years, and they've gone through several periods during which they've fallen in and out of favor. But recently, they have steadily gained ground over many other competing machine learning algorithms. This resurgence is due to having computers that are fast, the use of graphical processing units (GPUs) versus the most traditional use of computing processing units (CPUs), better algorithms and neural net design, and increasingly larger datasets that we'll see in this book. To get an idea of their success, let's take the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (http://image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/, or just ImageNet). The participants train their algorithms using the ImageNet database. It contains more than one million high-resolution color images in over a thousand categories (one...