These notes are in the process of becoming a textbook. The process is quite unfinished, and the author solicits corrections, criticisms, and suggestions from students and other readers. Although I have tried to eliminate errors, some undoubtedly remain—caveat lector. Many typographical infelicities will no doubt persist until the final version. More material has yet to be added. Please let me have your suggestions about topics that are too important to be left out. I hope that future versions will cover Hopfield nets, Elman nets and other recurrent nets, radial basis functions, grammar and automata learning, genetic algorithms, and Bayes networks .... I am also collecting exercises and project suggestions which will appear in future versions. Yes, the final version will have a good index.