A method for organizing processors to perform artificial neural network tasks is provided. The method provides a computer executable methodology for organizing processors in a self-organizing, data driven, learning hardware with local interconnections. A training data is processed substantially in parallel by the locally interconnected processors. The local processors determine local interconnections between the processors based on the training data. The local processors then determine, substantially in parallel, transformation functions and/or entropy based thresholds for the processors based on the training data.