Dynamics

Although the feed-forward network architectures are most employed in engineering applications, allowing some down-stream neurons to connect to up-stream ones adds an interesting feature - dynamics. Such recurrent networks exhibit the characteristics of complex, adaptive systems. This can be used for various useful things, but is mainly invoked to de-blur noisy images or recognise the handwriting of engineering students7. This might also be a possible link to artificial intelligence, since complex dynamical systems are more or less prerequisites for sentience. But then a waterfall is also a complex dynamical system, so don't expect too much.