Invented by Frank Rosenblatt at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratoryin the late 1950s, the development of the perceptron was originally motivated by efforts to simulate the human brain. A brain is composed of cells calledneuronsthat process information, and connections between neurons are calledsynapses, through which information is transmitted. The human brain has been estimated to be composed of as many as 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses. Illustrated in the following image, the main components of a neuron are dendrites, a body, and an axon. The dendrites receive electrical signals from other neurons. The signals are processed in the neuron's body, which then sends a signal through the axon to another neuron.
An individual neuron can be thought of as a computational unit that processes one or more inputs to produce an output. A perceptron functions analogously to a neuron; it accepts one or more inputs, processes them, and returns an output. It may seem that a...