PlaNet software

[Prahlad.Gupta@K.GP.CS.CMU.EDU]

I've just been looking at some simulators.  I'd be very interested in
other people's opinions, especially on simulators that provide the
ability to configure architectures in non-standard ways, and that
interface with pretty graphics displays.

I'd be happy to e-mail anyone who's interested a compilation I made of
info about NN simulators, culled from this mailiing list from the last
year or so.  However, this mainly details the *availability* of the
products, and not user reviews.

Here's my (somewhat superficial) assessment:

1. Both the PDP and PlaNet systems allow you to set up *standard*
sorts of models pretty fast.

2. Only PlaNet interfaces these with good graphics that let you
examine network internals.

3. For models/architectures that depart significantly from "standard",
you need to program things yourself.  (a) With PDP, you need to work
on the simulator code itself.  (b) PlaNet provides a set of functions
which are *meant* to give the user this capability.  However, certain
things aren't that easy to do -- eg. I couldn't see an easy way to
handle I/O in my own data format (as opposed to PlaNet's imposed file
format) without writing my own I/O routines.

4. If you really need to devise strange networks and don't want to
write a simulator yourself, you need fairly extensive programming
capability *within* an existing simulator.  As far as I can tell, the
Rochester Connectionist Simulator provides this.  However, I haven't
yet examined it closely, and I'm not sure how good it's graphics
capabilities are for someone who'd rather not dive into X programming.


-- Prahlad