Rumelhart had set himself a very particular, but central, challenge. One of the great problems with building a multilayered neural network was that it was very difficult to determine the relative importance (“the weight”) of each neuron to the calculation as a whole. With a single-layer network, like the Perceptron, this was at least doable: The system could automatically set its own weights across its single layer of neurons. But with a multilayered network, such an approach simply didn’t work. The relationships between the neurons were too expansive and too complex. Changing the weight of
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