Neural networks are inspired by the human brain' more specifically, by the neuron cells that compose it. Actually, since there have been major advances in neuroscience since the first artificial neuron was designed, it would be better to say that they are inspired by what was known about the brain some years ago.
The perceptron was the first attempt to build an artificial neural network (Frank Rosenblatt, 1959). It was actually a model of a single neuron, with multiple inputs and one output. The value at the output is calculated as the weighted sum of the inputs and these weights are adjusted iteratively. This simple implementation has many disadvantages and limitations, so it was later replaced by the multilayer perceptron. The most basic model of this artificial neural network has the structure shown...
