A traditional digital computer does many tasks very well. It's quite fast, and it does exactly what you tell it to do. Unfortunately, it can't help you when you yourself don't fully understand the problem you want to be solved. Even worse, standard algorithms don't deal well with noisy or incomplete data, yet in the real world, that's frequently the only kind available. One answer is to use an artificial neural network (ANN), a computing system that can learn on its own.