Does anyone know of a good Neural Net programming tutorial? I''ve heard a lot about these things but I have no clue how they work internally or how to begin coding a simple one...

Well, I''ve done a bit of research on nns. Not much but enough to see how they work in the brain. And what I devised was a system optimised for games and other computer based applications. It basically reduces the number of neurons and links and also speeds up the learning process.
What I did was to replace the neurons with more application specific commands (like "Is Enemy Nearby", "Health Level" and "Move Forward") and hardcoded those decisions and actions. by doing this, the chances of bad learning are greatly reduced allowing for quicker learning.
The dendrites and axons (links between neurons) are called links and each one has a score out of 100. Whenever there is a success (Say the computer takes a knight in chess), the links involved recieve extra points. If something bad happens (Checkmate to computer) then the links will lose points. If the points for a link drop below the threshhold value then the link is destroyed and a random link is placed with a neutral score.
This system works quite well for many applications although it may help to put in a learning mode so you can evaluate it''s successes and failures.
The problems with this method is that a lot of the ''human'' aspect is lost, unless you specifically remember it. For example, if you consistently attack player 2 who is controlled by a neural net and it finally gets its chance to kill either you or player 3, it may still have a 50/50 chance of attacking either even though a human would have disrespect for you and be wanting vengence

my $0.02

To MadKeithV,

Name one thing intelligent life does that isn''t based in pattern recognition.

Mike

Thanks for the links :-)

I saw something about some guy in the states that uses hardware neural nets (a bunch of transistors) in little robots that look like bugs. These things can walk around, compete with each other for light (the solar powered ones) and some can even pray on other bugs by stealing power from their batterys. They have about the same intelligence as real insects, ie- not a whole lot, but they don''t contain any software at all. They weren''t explicitly programmed to do any of these things. Kinda neat.

How do you determine whether anything you do creatively is good or bad? How do you decide what direction to head for with your creativity? Past experience. Mental adaption to previous stimuli. Pattern recognition.

Mike

Yes, but can we design a neural net that doesn''t lose nodes when we take a bong hit?