Recurrent networks have been shown to be very powerful in predicting time series data. This is something fundamental to biological brains that enables us to do things such as safely drive a car, play a musical instrument, evade predators, understand language, and interact with a dynamic world. This sense of the flow of time and the understanding of how things change over time is fundamental to intelligent life, so it is no surprise that in artificial systems this ability is important.
The ability to understand time series data is also important in creative endeavors, and recurrent networks have shown some ability in things such as composing a melody, constructing grammatically correct sentences, and creating visually pleasing images.
Feedforward and convolutional networks achieve very good results, as we have seen, in tasks such as the classification...