Arti cial Neural Networks: A Tutorial

Numerous advances have been made in developing \intelligent " programs, some of which have been inspired by biological neural networks. Researchers from various scienti c disciplines are designing articial neural networks (ANNs) to solve a variety of problems in decision making, optimization, prediction, and control. Articial neural networks can be viewed as parallel and distributed processing systems which consist of a huge number of simple and massively connected processors. There has been a resurgence of interest in the eld of ANNs in recent years. This article intends to serve as a tutorial for those readers with little or no knowledge about ANNs to enable them to understand the remaining articles of this special issue. We discuss the motivations behind developing ANNs, main issues of network architecture and learning process, and basic network models. We also brie y describe one of the most successful applications of ANNs, namely automatic character recognition.