I spent some time studying Self-Organizing Maps, a neural network algorithm from Teuvo Kohonen, a Finnish professor. The internet has plenty of resources: htt

I spent some time studying Self-Organizing Maps, a neural network algorithm from Teuvo Kohonen, a Finnish professor. The internet has plenty of resources: http://www.google.com/search?q=self+organizing+maps http://www.google.com/search?q=self+organizing+maps I implemented the two canonical 'hello world' projects in processing, but have yet to apply to a 'real' problem. The emergent behavior is fascinating, as is watching maps coalesce in real-time. There are plenty of other algorithms available; a basic "back propagation" algorithm is widely used in OCR algorithms. Try reading some of these: http://www.google.com/search?q=neural+networks+image+recognition http://www.google.com/search?q=neural+networks+image+recogni... Don't get too wrapped around the axle of trying to find immediate electronics engineering applications, but understand the algorithms and the applications will become self-evident.