[squeak-dev] neural net in Squeak?
Cameron Sanders
csanders.personal at functional-analyst.com
Thu Jul 9 21:38:04 UTC 2009
John,
A basic synchronous feed-forward model (with back propagation
training) isn't that hard to write and/or translatefrom another
language. I found an example written in Python a number of years ago
that is only about 50 lines of code (for 3-tier net) -- you could
rewrite that in Squeak, add a sane class hierarchy (that would be
mostly empty at first), generalize the topology, add the higher level
driving methods, and do the basic debugging in pretty short-order.
But is that enough? You are interested in human learning, so perhaps
you actually want asynchronous updates, or something in between.
(don't ask... i am not certain I can put it to words without spending
too much time.)
It is worth considering. I probably will build a limited toolkit in
smalltalk within a year... but not today.
How large of a net are you wanting to work with? What kind of human
processing are you wanting to observe? I am thinking about performance
with these questions. If you want a large network, then one probably
needs to use an external library.
The over-training warnings are worth paying attention to: do not force
the system to fit a small data set exactly, and do use too many nodes
for the problem.
--
Python is dead-simple to work with. It is very flexible. It is
typeless and has garbage collection, but uses c-like expressions in
many cases. so... using FANN with the Python may not be as difficult
as you think. I installed XCode here on this Mac (my first mac) and
python and numerous other languages are ready-to-use as a result -- or
maybe they were here before, but now I have the folding code browser
for it. XCode is free from Apple.
Good Luck and please let us know if you find a great turn-key solution!
Cheers,
Cam
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