The thermal perceptron is a simple extension to Rosenblatt's perceptron learning rule for training individual linear threshold units. It finds stable weights for nonseparable problems as well as separable ones. Experiments indicate that if a good initial setting for a temperature parameter, T 0 , has been found, then the thermal perceptron outperforms the Pocket algorithm and methods based on gradient descent. The learning rule stabilizes the weights (learns) over a fixed training period. For separable problems it finds separating weights much more quickly than the usual rules.

A general method for building and training multilayer perceptrons composed of linear threshold units is proposed. A simple recursive rule is used to build the structure of the network by adding units as they are needed, while a modified perceptron algorithm is used to learn the connection strengths. Convergence to zero errors is guaranteed for any boolean classification on patterns of binary variables. Simulations suggest that this method is efficient in terms of the numbers of units constructed, and the networks it builds can generalize over patterns not in the training set.