March 14, 2022

The Yann LeCun et al. (1989) paper Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten Zip Code Recognition is I believe of some historical significance because it is, to my knowledge, the earliest real-world application of a neural net trained end-to-end with backpropagation. Except for the tiny dataset (7291 16×16 grayscale images of digits) and the tiny neural network used (only 1,000 neurons), this paper reads remarkably modern today, 33 years later – it lays out a dataset, describes