Introduction
Back in the 80's and even early 90's Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) were often touted the panacea of Artificial Intelligence. Over time we have come to realize that although a powerful AI tool they have limitations.
Pattern recognition is where ANNs excel. Handwriting recognition is a fantastic example of how they are used successfully. Post Office sorting offices use ANN technology to auto-sort mail. This code uses samples from the Canadian Post Office of actual handwriting. Some of the samples are very hard to read by a human and once trained this simple ANN code can identify thousands of previously unknown characters with around 94% accuracy using only microseconds per character. Apparently this is a good result for handwritten characters.