Hi all, In researching neural networks, I repeatedly found myself frustrated because existing neural networks have documentation that assumes quite a bit of knowledge about them. In working with them, I also found that the pure Perl networks were so slow while training as to be almost useless to me. To this end, I started doing a bit of research about these things and have come up with a module, AI::NeuralNet::Simple. The core network is written in C with the interface in Perl. You can download it from http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/cgi_course/downloads/AI-NeuralNet-Simple-.01.tar.gz
The intent is to have a *simple* neural network that someone new to neural nets can just pick up, read the docs, and play with. Later they can move to a more robust solution, if desired. If people would provide me with feedback on the docs, I would appreciate it. Some caveats: 1. Somehow, I managed to not include the error measuring function. Whoops! This function allows the user to measure the error rate to determine how training is going. Not sure how I missed that, but I'm just dashing off a quick email while at work, so I'll write this later and issue a new version. 2. There is currently no way to load or save a network. I'm not sure if this is an issue as this is only designed to be something to play with. 3. You can not have more than one network at a time because of my rotten C code -- I am *not* a C programmer, but I'll probably fix this later if it's a problem. 4. The docs do not make it clear that this module works best for "winner take all" results. I have two examples in the "examples" directory. The "game_ai.pl" example is borrowed from the book "AI Application Programming" (with the permission of the author). I am not putting this module on the CPAN unless I feel it's ready for prime time. Cheers, Ovid ===== Silence is Evil http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/philosophy/indexdecency.htm Ovid http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=17000 Web Programming with Perl http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/cgi_course/ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com
