How does an artificial neural network function?
In: Technology
Our brains have lots of little connections inside them. Those connections can move around and make other connections too!
Those connections are eventually connected to our other organs like our eyes, ears, skin, nose, etc… and can mix and match connections as we age. Those connections in turn help our organs to react to the world. It’s how we know what smells good, or bad. It’s how we learn to walk by controlling our muscles. Things like that.
The way these connections are actually made is known on a small scale, but a lot less understood how they work on a big scale. For example we know how neurons are physically structured and how they transmit signals, but we don’t really understand how many many thousands of connections represent complex behavior like talking or reading. We know there are many many connection groups that do one or many things and some groups can even do some of the duties of other groups. We even know what some of those groups are.
ANNs try to emulate some of that behavior. We make lots of little connections that eventually are connected to inputs and outputs that act like our organs. Then ask them to do something like learn to walk a digital mannequin or identify pictures of cats.
At first they do really badly and act pretty much randomly. Then we tweak the connections and have them try again. There is a lot of study that goes into how exactly to tweak the connections but it’s basically the same thing in the end, making the connections perform ‘better’ at a task than it did before.
Just like with the study of living brains we don’t really know ‘how’ it knows wha to do. Only that it got better at doing it through learning by mistakes.
Lots of study is going into figuring out how exactly those connections work on a higher scale and we can use that info to possibly understand living brains better too.
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