This manuscript attempts to provide the reader with an insight in artificial neural networks. Back in 1990, the absence of any state-of-the-art textbook forced us into writing our own. However, in the meantime a number of worthwhile textbooks have been published which can be used for background and in-depth information. We are aware of the fact that, at times, this manuscript may prove to be too thorough or not thorough enough for a complete understanding of the material; therefore, further reading material can be found in some excellent text books such as (Hertz, Krogh, &: Palmer, 1991; Ritter, Martinetz, &: Schulten, 1990; Kohonen, 1995; Anderson & Rosenfeld, 1988; DARPA, 1988; McClelland & Rumelhart, 1986; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986).
Some of the material in this book, especially parts III and IV, contains timely material and thus may heavily change throughout the ages. The choice of describing robotics and vision as neural network applications coincides with the neural network research interests of the authors.
Much of the material presented in chapter 6 has been written by Joris van Dam and Anuj Dev at the University of Amsterdam. Also, Anuj contributed to material in chapter 9. The basis of chapter 7 was form by a report of Gerard Schram at the University of Amsterdam. Furthermore, we express our gratitude to those people out there in Net-Land who gave us feedback on this manuscript, especially Michiel van der Korst and Nicolas Maudit who pointed out quite a few of our goof-ups. We owe them many kwartjes for their help.
The seventh edition is not drastically different from the sixth one; we corrected some typing errors, added some examples and deleted some obscure parts of the text. In the eighth edition, symbols used in the text have been globally changed. Also, the chapter on recurrent networks has been (albeit marginally) updated. The index still requires an update, though.
Amsterdam/Oberpfaffenhofen, November 1996
Patrick van der Smagt Ben Krose
