1986Peer-reviewedWell documented
Backpropagation
On the timeline · around 1986 ·
What happened
In a landmark Nature paper, David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton, and Ronald Williams showed how the 'back-propagation' algorithm could train multi-layer neural networks, letting hidden layers learn useful internal representations of a problem.
Why it matters
Backpropagation solved the training problem that had crippled neural networks and remains the foundational algorithm behind modern deep learning.