Rumelhart, D. E. and J. L. McClelland, Ed. (1986). Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. Cambridge MA, MIT Press/Bradford Books. [buy book]

Amazon.com Books:
This two-volume work is now considered a classic in the field. It
presents the results of the Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP)
group's work in the early 1980s and provides a good overview of
the earlier neural network research. The PDP approach (also
known as connectionism among other things) is based on the
conviction that various aspects of cognitive activity are thought of in
terms of massively parallel processing. The first volume starts with
the general framework and continues with an analysis of learning
mechanisms and various mathematical and computational tools
important in the analysis of neural networks. The chapter on
backpropagation is written by Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams,
who codiscovered the algorithm in 1986. The second volume is
written with a psychological and biological emphasis. It explores the
relationship of PDP to various aspects of human cognition. The
book is a comprehensive research survey of its time and most of the
book's results and methods are still at the foundation of the neural
network field.


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