URLS:

 o Don Tveter's The Pattern Recognition Basis of AI at 
   http://www.dontveter.com/basisofai/char.html 
 o Andras Kornai's homepage at http://www.cs.rice.edu/~andras/ 
 o Yann LeCun's homepage at http://www.research.att.com/~yann/
   Data sets of handwritten digits can be found at 
   http://www.research.att.com/~yann/exdb/mnist/ 

Other references: 

   Hastie, T., and Simard, P.Y. (1998), "Metrics and models for handwritten
   character recognition," Statistical Science, 13, 54-65. 

   Jackel, L.D. et al., (1994) "Comparison of Classifier Methods: A Case
   Study in Handwritten Digit Recognition", 1994 International Conference on
   Pattern Recognition, Jerusalem 

   LeCun, Y., Jackel, L.D., Bottou, L., Brunot, A., Cortes, C., Denker,
   J.S., Drucker, H., Guyon, I., Muller, U.A., Sackinger, E., Simard, P.,
   and Vapnik, V. (1995), "Comparison of learning algorithms for handwritten
   digit recognition," in F. Fogelman and P. Gallinari, eds., International
   Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, pages 53-60, Paris. 

   Orr, G.B., and Mueller, K.-R., eds. (1998), Neural Networks: Tricks of
   the Trade, Berlin: Springer, ISBN 3-540-65311-2.