In the previous chapters we toiled through a lot of nitty-gritties. It’s time to take a step back and enjoy the big picture.
In this first part of this book, we built a supervised learning system based on a specific architecture—one that ML pundits would call the perceptron. By the end of this chapter, you’ll know what a perceptron looks like and what it can do. Crucially, you will also know what it can not do, and why we must move forward into more sophisticated algorithms such as neural networks.
Besides wrapping our heads around the perceptron, we’re also going to talk about its history. Far from being a boring history lesson, this will be an epic war tale—a clash of ideas that impacted much of what we know about computers.