david@epicb.UUCP (David P. Cook) (09/23/88)
I am alittle taken-back by this group (comp.ai.neural-nets)... So far, I have YET to see any discussion concerning neural nets in this news group! What's the deal??? Neural nets are the wave of the future... I know there are LOTS of people and research institutions working on them out there and there are already several commercially available products. The only thing I can assume is that these people are working on such great projects that it's to hush hush... but they feel that in order to keep this group alive, they gotta post other junk in it (flame). Come on! Lots of us want to keep abreast of the latest in neural progress! So... to get the ball rolling... can anyone give me more scoop on the BUMBLEBEE system... supposedly it contained roughly the same number of neurons as a bumble-bee. I'd love to see it, it bet it flys! (no pun intended... or was it :-) PLEASE... let's post some REAL neural technology goodies on this net eh?? -- | David P. Cook Net: uunet!epicb!david | | Truevision Inc. | "Specialization is for insects" | | Indianapolis, IN | -- Timothy Leary | -----------------------------------------------------------
jerry@amos.ling.ucsd.edu (Jerry Lugert) (09/27/88)
In article <551@epicb.UUCP> david@epicb.UUCP (David P. Cook) writes: >I am alittle taken-back by this group (comp.ai.neural-nets)... So far, I > > Come on! Lots of us want to keep abreast of the latest in neural > progress! > > So... to get the ball rolling... can anyone give me more scoop on the > BUMBLEBEE system... supposedly it contained roughly the same number of > neurons as a bumble-bee. I'd love to see it, it bet it flys! (no pun I heard this bumble-bee was just a rumor, a joke. There is a very significant difference between designing a neural network with the same number of neurons as a bee and making an actual model of a bee's brain using a connectionist system. Jerry
sbrunnoc@hawk.ulowell.edu (Sean Brunnock) (09/28/88)
In article <551@epicb.UUCP> david@epicb.UUCP (David P. Cook) writes: > What's the deal??? Neural nets are the wave of the future... I know > there are LOTS of people and research institutions working on them out > there and there are already several commercially available products. Having attended the INNS conference and trying out many of the exhibitor's products firsthand, I am not impressed with what is commercially available in terms of neural network products and programs. I believe that most of the products at the conference can be categorized into three groups: books, programs to allow people to build neural networks, and handwriting analyzers. Books, I cannot complain about. Neural net builders are nice but not groundbreaking. The handwriting analyzers did not fare well with me. These neural net programs didn't do any better than signature table products of twenty years ago. Of course the neural net programs can be retrained. But Nestor's handwriting analyzer, after five days of training by various attendees of the coference, gave me a response of "re11o" after I wrote "hello". My handwriting is legible, and I was not trying to fool the machine. My criteria for a good handwriting analyzer is one that can recognize letters that are written on its side or upside-down. I bet there are some neural-nets out there that can do this. > So... to get the ball rolling... can anyone give me more scoop on the > BUMBLEBEE system... supposedly it contained roughly the same number of > neurons as a bumble-bee. I'd love to see it, it bet it flys! (no pun > intended... or was it :-) Sorry, but in terms of biological modelling, the best that has been done (that I know of) is a neural network that can simulate the movement of a round worm (Computer Simulation of the Motor-Neural System of a Simple Invertebrate, E. Niebur and P. Erdos). Sean Brunnock
tomh@proxftl.UUCP (Tom Holroyd) (09/30/88)
In article <9332@swan.ulowell.edu> sbrunnoc@hawk.ulowell.edu (Sean Brunnock) writes: > Having attended the INNS conference and trying out many of the exhibitor's >products firsthand, I am not impressed with what is commercially available >in terms of neural network products and programs. > > I believe that most of the products at the conference can be categorized >into three groups: books, programs to allow people to build neural networks, >and handwriting analyzers. Hmm. I sort of liked Excalibur's Savvy system that did recognition of photo-id badges in real time. There were a lot of books there. There were also many systems designed to help others design NN products. But there was a lot more there than just handwriting recognition. Several other types of recognition were featured. Process control was also common. Robotics experts there said that NN's would play a major role in industry in the coming years. >But Nestor's handwriting analyzer, after five days of training >by various attendees of the coference, gave me a response of "re11o" >after I wrote "hello". Like you said, after five days of training. Some of that training included random garbage. I watched a guy train it to respond to smiley faces, some with triangular heads. Correctly trained systems are being readied for real-word chores like recognizing the hand written numbers on checks and credit card receipts (Nestor, BancTec, AmEx). There are already several mortgage and loan analysis programs on the market (Nestor, Adaptive Decision Systems). What I came away with was a healthy respect for the speed with which many groups have gone to market, and the wide range of applications. Building a bee will probably require special parallel hardware, tho. Tom Holroyd UUCP: {uflorida,uunet}!novavax!proxftl!tomh The white knight is talking backwards.
bstev@pnet12.cts.com (Barry Stevens) (10/01/88)
With reference to Savvy:
Die-hard neural network purists say that Savvy has nothing to do with
neural nets. The explanation I got was that the system has no "connection"
to recognized neural networks, such as back propogation.
I asked the original author of the program what was under the covers. He
wouldn't answer me directly, but suggested that I look up papers on
something called "n-tuple pattern recognition", and that they were, among
other places, found in the Sandia Labs library. I called Sandia, and since
I'm not an employee, couldn't get a copy.
I'd like to do some reading on the topic -- does anyone know where I can
find papers on the topic : "N-tuple pattern recognition?"
I have used Savvy. It has a very friendly front end, being as smart about
English as you are with the synonyms you can build, it has an extremely
powerful parsing capability that has let me experiment with extracting
production rules from text, and performs nearest-neighbor classification on
the words you want to look up very quickly. Whether or not this qualifies
as neural network capabilities...
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