Delving into deep neural networks

So far, we’ve scratched the surface of several ANNs, because there are so many variants that it would be very difficult to collate them all in this document, and it would be beyond the scope of this book. The main problem with ANNs was that toward the end of the last century, they hit a brick wall, and advancements were moving at a relatively slow pace.

This changed soon after the turn of the century due to three main reasons:

• The amount of information available online in digital form provided a fertile ground for data-hungry algorithms such as ANNs. Just consider that up to 90% of the world’s data was created in the past 2 years, and is constantly increasing at an impressive rate of 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day.
• The advancement in video game development. Back then, game developers were looking at ways in which they could improve the graphics. Because of this, they needed a more powerful and dedicated processor...