 In 1982 , physicist John Hopfield was able to prove that a form of neural network ( now called a " Hopfield net " ) could learn and process information in a completely new way . Around the same time , David Rumelhart popularized a new method for training neural networks called " <unk> " ( discovered years earlier by Paul <unk> ) . These two discoveries revived the field of connectionism which had been largely abandoned since 1970 . 
