Introduction and Theory

Humans have an outstanding ability to recognise, classify and discriminate objects with extreme ease. For example, if a person was in a large classroom and was asked to find the light switch it would not take more than a second or two. Even if the light switch was located in a different place than the human expected or it was shaped differently than the human expected it would not be difficult to find the switch. Another example is that of recognising dogs. A human needs to see only a few examples and then he is able to recognise dogs even from species that he has not seen before. This recognition ability also holds true for animals, to a greater or lesser extent. A spider has no problem recognising a fly. Even a baby spider can do that. At this level we are talking about a few hundred to a thousand processing elements or neurons. Nevertheless the biological systems seem to do their job very well.