True Parallel Processing in Artificial Neural Networks

Overview

The area of artificial neural networks, which dates back to the early twentieth century, could only offer positive contributions to technology after the back-propagation algorithm was proposed in 1986. In this note an alternative algorithm to the gradient descent used in back-propagation is proposed. This algorithm is based on the discrete central difference. This procedure, as opposed to the back-propagation algorithm, offers the possibility of true parallel computation.