Stephen Downes

This is a much-needed revision to the SEP's entry on connectionism, the science of neural networks for artificial intelligence, including especially a look at the newest wave of connectionist theory called 'deep learning'. Connectionism was of course directly responsible for a lot of my own work and the basic ideas of subsymbolic representation and distributed processing were key to my own thinking. You'll find a lot of contemporary debate in education contained in the section on 'the shape of the controversy between connectionists and classicists'. Anyhow, this is a straightforward presentation of an important topic.