[jordigh]

Why have neural networks become synonymous with backprop networks? Is it because those are the most successful? What happened to bidirectional associatve memory and Kohonen maps? Does anyone take the biological inspiration of neural networks seriously anymore?

[limsup]

people are mostly interested in what is successful and backprop/gradient descent (with certain specific architectures) is what has been dropping error rates on all sorts of tasks in recent years.