The Perceptron is the basic node in a neural network -- sometimes also referred to as a unit, or a neuron. It has one or more connections feeding in, an equal number of weights, a bias scalar, an activation function, and an output connection. The perceptron multiplies each input by the corresponding weight, adds everything, adds bias, applies the activation function, and sends out the result. The activation is typically a non-linear function -- without it, the Perceptron is simply a linear regression.