I don't think we would be that far behind.
NNs had lost favor in the AI community after 1969 (minsky's paper) and only have become popular again in the last decade. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network
The only crossover that comes to mind for me is the vision deep learning 'discovering' edge detection. There also is some interest in sparse NN activation.
NNs had lost favor in the AI community after 1969 (minsky's paper) and only have become popular again in the last decade
Yes, I'm familiar with the history. But how far would we be without the neural network work done since ~2001? The non-neural-network competitors on Imagenet like SVM are nowhere near human levels of performance, Watson required neural networks, Stanley won the DARPA Grand Challenge without neural networks because it had so many sensors but real self-driving cars will have to use neural networks, neural networks are why Google Translate...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.