 Perhaps the best technique for teaching students about neural networks in the context of other statistical learning formalisms and methods is to focus on a specific problem, preferably one that seems unnatural to tackle using logicist techniques. The task is then to seek to engineer a solution to the problem, using any and all techniques available. One nice problem is handwriting recognition (which also happens to have a rich philosophical dimension; see e.g. Hofstadter &amp; McGraw 1995). For example, consider the problem of assigning, given as input a handwritten digit \(d\), the correct digit, 0 through 9. Because there is a database of 60,000 labeled digits available to researchers (from the National Institute of Science and Technology), this problem has evolved into a benchmark problem for comparing learning algorithms. It turns out that neural networks currently reign as the best approach to the problem according to a recent ranking by Benenson (2016).