INTRODUCTION The study of the human brain is thousands of years old. With the advent of modern electronics, it was only natural to try to harness this thinking process. The first step toward artificial neural networks came in 1943 when Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist, and a young mathematician, Walter Pitts, wrote a paper on how neurons might work. They modeled a simple neural network with electrical circuits. Neural networks, with their remarkable ability to derive meaning from complicated or imprecise data, can be used to extract patterns and detect trends that are too complex to be noticed by either humans or other computer techniques. A trained neural network can be thought of as an "expert" in the category of information it has been given to analyse. Other advantages include: