#NeuroPro?
2 messages in this thread
Daniel,
What's NeuroPro? I hadn't heard of it. It sounds like it must be a neural
network program. I train neural networks at work for various applications, and
do a bit of algorithm development. Most of our work in the past few years has
been on image search problems.
Clay Spence
NeuroPro is indeed a (the only commercial) neural network AI program for Amiga.
3-layer backpropagation 'textbook' but nifty, with a complete color display of
network operation and connections. Accepts inputs (256 neurons per layer,
adjustable from 1 to 256 in each layer) as text strings, little 8×8 or 16×16
2-color pictures, or random bit strings. You create training files of
'training pairs' for it and away it goes. You can turn off all the display
trickery to get it to train faster – up to 200-300,000 connections per second
on a fast '040 system. As you might expect, only a few folks have purchased it
(available since '92 in the updated floating point version), but it got an
'Editor's Choice' review in CU Amiga in England a year or so ago.
Unfortunately, most who have purchased it haven't put in even the minimal
effort to do useful things or have somehow thought a neural network program
would 'program itself' – of course, you have to intelligently figure out a set
of training pairs. It won't automatically just know how to pick the stock
market for you but it will definitely do arbitrary bit-string pattern
recognition when provided with training pair files. I've done some cute things
– taught the Amiga to pronounce Spanish language translations of English words,
for example. Another fellow taught it to distinguish male from female faces by
using AdPro to process a bunch of images into 16×16 inputs for NeuroPro. There
is also another image recognition toy tutorial with it that shows it can
recognize images it was trained on even when fed versions of them that are
goofed up. I did a lot of AI work in the 1980s on logic languages (got a patent
on a hardware implementation of a 4-valued logic method) but when neural nets
came along I thought they were a much better approach so I made one for the
Amiga – to, unfortunately, not very thunderous applause. It is defitely one of
the more esoteric and cool Amiga programs.