Hands-On Convolutional Neural Networks with TensorFlow

The XOR problem

To explain the importance of depth in an ANN, we will look at a very simple problem that an ANN is able to solve because it has more than one layer.

In the early days of working with artificial neurons, people did not cascade layers together like we do in ANNs, so we ended up with a single layer that was named a perceptron:

The perceptron is effectively just a dot product between an input and a set of learned weights, which means that it is actually just a linear classifier.

It was around the time of the first AI winter that people realized the weaknesses of the perceptron. As it is just a linear classifier, it is not able ...