4、The Struggles and Resurgence of Neural Networks

The Struggles and Resurgence of Neural Networks

1. Yann LeCun and the Birth of LeNet

In 1989, Yann LeCun, a 29 - year - old computer scientist and electrical engineer from Paris, was sitting at a desktop computer at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. He demonstrated LeNet, a system he created. LeCun placed a slip of paper with a hand - written phone number (201 - 949 - 4038) under a camera connected to the computer. After a few seconds of calculation, the machine read the number and displayed it in digital form.

LeNet learned to recognize hand - written numbers by analyzing envelopes of dead letters from the U.S. Postal Service. It analyzed thousands of examples of each digit from 0 to 9 over about two weeks of training and could then recognize them ind