The Community for Technology Leaders RSS Icon Issue No.03 -
March (1988 vol.21) pp: 105-117 <p>The emergence of a feature-
analyzing function from the development rules of simple,
multilayered networks is explored. It is shown that even a
single developing cell of a layered network exhibits a
remarkable set of optimization properties that are closely
related to issues in statistics, theoretical physics, adaptive
signal processing, the formation of knowledge representation in
artificial intelligence, and information theory. The network
studied is based on the visual system. These results are used to
infer an information-theoretic principle that can be applied to
the network as a whole, rather than a single cell. The
organizing principle proposed is that the network connections
develop in such a way as to maximize the amount of information
that is preserved when signals are transformed at each
processing stage, subject to certain constraints. The operation
of this principle is illustrated for some simple cases.<