Artificial neurons – a brief glimpse into the early history of machine learning

Before we discuss the perceptron and related algorithms in more detail, let us take a brief tour through the early beginnings of machine learning. Trying to understand how the biological brain works to design artificial intelligence, Warren McCullock and Walter Pitts published the first concept of a simplified brain cell, the so-called McCullock-Pitts (MCP) neuron, in 1943 (W. S. McCulloch and W. Pitts. A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity. The bulletin of mathematical biophysics, 5(4):115–133, 1943). Neurons are interconnected nerve cells in the brain that are involved in the processing and transmitting of chemical and electrical signals, which is illustrated in the following figure:

McCullock and Pitts described such a nerve cell as a simple logic gate with binary outputs; multiple signals arrive at the dendrites, are then integrated into the cell body, and, if the accumulated...