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From: DavidC@ise.canberra.edu.au (David Clark)
Subject: why back prop?
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Date: Mon, 16 Jan 1995 03:12:11 GMT

Can someone tell me why the backpropogation algorithm was invented?
It's essentially steepest descent with no line search. Steepest descent is not 
a good nonlinear optimisation algorithm.
Why not just use a numerical package such as IMSL or NAG?

David
