Artificial Intelligence

The goal of this article is to help you understand what a neural network is, and how it is used. Most people, even non-programmers, have heard of neural networks. There are many science fiction overtones associated with them. And like many things, sci-fi writers have created a vast, but somewhat inaccurate, public idea of what a neural network is.

Would you like to see Encog Silverlight in action? Silverlight works quite a bit like flash. Except you can program it in C#, without having to learn Flash. There is a version of Encog for Silverlight. You can see several examples, in full GUI, here.

http://www.heatonresearch.com/encog/benchmark.html

We just released version 1.1 of Encog for DotNet. This also includes a Workbench that allowed editing of Encog datafiles. This is a major update to the Encog Neural Network and Bot framework. v1.1 adds the Encog workbench, which is a GUI tool that can be used to edit the .EG files that Encog uses to save neural networks and training data. The workbench can be used to construct all neural network types that Encog supports, such as Hopfield, Feedforward, and Self Organizing Maps. Training can also be performed using the workbench.

Encog 1.0 for Java has been released. Encog 1.0 for C# will be released soon, and is currently in the works. For now, Encog 0.5 is the current C# release. The following is a list of features that were implemented in Encog 1.0.

• All Neural networks should implement the Network interface
• Package structure reorg
• Allow the three neural networks to be persisted in an XML format
• Unify the three neural network types into a single solution
• Add an image based data source
• Add a CSV based data source
  

Introduction to Neural Networks with Java, Second Edition is now available for purchase
E-Book form! You can also download all examples from this book. We will be posting about
half of it online soon. The book will go off to the printer on Monday, and will show up
on Amazon(and the others) in paperback form within a few weeks. The C# neural network
book is nearly complete. It should come out sometime in October, 2008.

Version 0.5 of Encog-C# has been released. A Java version is also available. Encog is a framework that includes neural networks, as well as HTTP bots and spiders. Heaton Research has released books on these two very interesting topics. We will soon be updating our Java neural network book, as well as adding a C# neural network book. The books are meant to introduce the topics of bots and neural networks. We are now combining the code from the books into an open source framework so that the code can be extended and moved into more advanced areas than the introductory topics of the books.

I am nearing the final stages of two new books. Introduction to Neural Networks for Java and Introduction to Neural Networks for C#. The Java book is the Second Edition to the original "Introduction to Neural Networks with Java". This is a considerable update to the original text. The covers for the two new books can be seen below. The Java book is expected to be out in September,2008. The C# book by January,2009. More information on these two books will be posted in the coming weeks.