Mitchell Timin wrote: > My motivation waxes and wanes. Recently, it has waned again. It will > probably > come back eventually, at least it always has in the past. So I'm not > doing any > actual programming right now. I still check our website stats, and I > still > look over comp.ai.neural-nets and comp.ai.genetic, and make the occasional > post. Of course I read any messages that come thru this mailing list, but > lately I'm the only poster. > > I'm still available to assist anyone who wants to do something. Would > anyone > like to prepare something to be published on our SF pages or home pages? > > I took a brief look at Dave's program, wbreduce.c, and it looks good. It > could > be published along with my waybak.c, but the latter needs changes to the > comments, which are still mostly using the vocabulary of 4Play.c. If > anyone > would be willing to edit the comments in that project they can get their > name > as a co-author. >
I started working up the image for the waybak VizANN earlier this week. Once I have that, I can start on the simulator coding. I will be on "vacation" next week (I will be programming at home instead of at the office.) I plan to spend some time on ANNEvolve. Shortly after writing wbreduce and observing the results, I started reading "The Three-Pound Enigma". The book contains an interview with Crick (a few months before he died) and Koch. Crick mentioned that his transition from biochemistry to consciousness studies began with a visit to Tomaso Poggio, who was studying dendritic spines at the time. The book notes that there is some evidence the spines are related to learning. I visualized a crude analogy where the connections eliminated by wbreduce were similar to the spines that fade away when learning 'settles'. If wbreduce ran periodically during the 'runmany' script, it would speed up the processing (if the connection count were actually reduced), making 'better' use of CPU time. Likewise, connections could be restored (as spines grow) as a part of the reverse process, nudging the ANN into new behavior. I haven't given it a whole lot of thought but I was thinking about the possibility of having 'fuller-than-fully-connected' ANNs (to correspond to burgeoning dendritic spine growth.) Obviously, multiple connections with simple weights would not be useful - superposition would collapse the connections into a single weight. No, something non-linear would have to be introduced. Just talking out loud....Maybe there's a good idea in there? I'll be posting occasionally during the next week. Dave ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV
