Build Your Own Neural Network

windowpain writes "I just discovered Joone. It's an LGPL neural net development environment for creating, training and testing neural networks. The aim is to create a powerful environment both for enthusiasts and professional users, based on the newest Java technologies. Joone is composed by a central engine that is the fulcrum of all applications that already exist or will be developed. It's available in Linux, MacOS and Windows versions."

Comments

Whats wrong with SNNS

[Directrix1]

The Stuttguart Neural Network Simulator has been available for free for a long time now.

Re:Whats wrong with SNNS

[KMAPSRULE]

From the SNNS licensing terms:
SNNSv4.1 is available NOW free of charge for research purposes under a...

LGPL(Joone's Licensing) is a VERY attractive License for commercial users, "free for research purposes" would preclude some from being able to use it,
other wise I agree this Joone seems to have less features/algorithm support than SNNS

Very limited number of algorithms

[a_ghostwheel]

Looks rather limited to me. It's again implements only BP algorithms and their variants. Why not include ART-based (adaptive resonance theory) and LVQ-based (linear vector quantization) algorithms? They are much more efficient than BP in many instances (e.g. classification problems).

In other words, sounds very limited to me.

Re:Very limited number of algorithms

[elmegil]

It's open source. Scratch your itch.

BTW implementing ART would be really cool. I always had trouble getting the full understanding of Grossberg's papers and didn't find many simulators that did ART 10 years ago when I was actually looking at all this stuff.

Can also be combined with genetic algorithms

[mrblah]

For those who want to combine genetic algorithms with neural networks, there's also a project that combines joone with JGAP (a Java genetic algorithms framework).

Another kind of solution.

[DoctorRad]

Self-Organising Maps can be used to solve many similar problems to those for which ANNs are appropriate. Check out the SOMPAK software. A shame my own research into data visualisation using this technique is company confidential to an ex-employer, some very pretty pictures :-)

The package inlcudes source code to produce Sammon Maps in Postscript format. These can be very useful tools for finding clusters in data. What they revealed about UK higher education institutes was eye opening.

Matt...
--
A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

Someone remembers Ralph!?!

[MarkusQ]

Hard as it is for me to believe, you may be talking about a language I wrote in the late 80's. "Ralph" was our internal name for it (inside joke); I think the market droids pushed it as NNSim or something like that. We released a full function version on a bunch of BBSs & talked it up on geni, compuserve, news groups, etc. to promote a hardware accelerator board (DSP based). The idea was people would get interested and then (as their models got larger) they'd want more speed and buy our accelerator board.

The core language was a based on pascal, but with salient structure (like python) and a bunch of (at the time) interesting extensions. You could declare networks and treat them like an array (for messing with the weights) or like a procedure (for training) or like a function (for using them).

Does this sound like what you're remembering?

-- MarkusQ

P.S. In case you can't guess how the story ends, it turned out that for really interesting networks you'd need a lot more oomph than our boards could provide. The product died, as did several others, and the company sank beneath the waves.