Backpropagation

Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams show how a multi-layer network can correct its errors by propagating the error signal backwards. This helps overcome the limitation highlighted by Minsky and Papert.

Why it is in the museum

Neural networks learn by adjusting large numbers of numerical weights. The idea is old, but the scale of data and computing made it far more powerful.

What supports this exhibit

Primary scientific paper

Training multi-layer networks with back-propagation.

Main source: Rumelhart, Hinton & Williams (1986), Nature 323, 533–536.

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What to keep in mind: Primary source.

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