Today, came to the PythonBrasil mailing list a question about how to start in Artificial Intelligence, in special about books to introduce the Artificial Neural Networks and, of course, how to do it in Python.
Nowadays, the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) includes so many techniques, approaches, theories and methods - search and optimization algorithms; probabilistic and statistical methods; neural networks and other bio-inspired methods; robotics; natural language processing; knowledge representation; data mining; social and multi-agent systems; etc - and it cannot be simply divided into two categories, symbolic and connectionist, as someone answered. In fact, the term lost its strength and nobody "works on Artificial Intelligence" anymore. Therefore, anyone who wants to start in this field, I suggest to take a look at its sub-fields. Wikipedia is a good start.
The Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) is one of these sub-fields of Artificial Intelligence. Moreover, if you have interest in ANN, I suggest you to look for Machine Learning (ML) too. Firstly, I recommend an online course and a book about this subject. The course "Neural Networks for Machine Learning" of Geoffrey Hinton, of University of Toronto, at Coursera is an awesome introduction to the field, despite its advanced topics. Geoffrey Hinton is the biggest name of ANN development nowadays, and in its online class, he introduce the field from the basic topics like perceptron to state-of-the-art Deep Learning models. The book "Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Foundation", by Simon Haykin, is another good start. This book is not so easy-to-understand, but it presents several important details that aren't found in minor books;
Unfortunately, most Python libraries for ANN do not provide an easy interface for beginners. Scikit-learn, FANN, and PyBrain, the most well known libraries, have awful structures and are difficult to learn. The only Python library that comes in my mind for this task - learn neural networks (or other machine learning techniques) - is Peach. It is a simple, pure-Python library, that focus on the educational proposal. Its ANN support is similar to the Neural Network framework of MATLAB.
Anyway, the best way to learn is doing by yourself. So, why are you not writing your own Python module?
