Cascade-Correlation simulator in C

[Scott.Fahlman@SEF1.SLISP.CS.CMU.EDU]

Thanks to Scott Crowder, one of my graduate students at Carnegie Mellon,
there is now a C version of the public-domain simulator for the
Cascade-Correlation learning algorithm.  This is a translation of the
original simulator that I wrote in Common Lisp.  Both versions are now
available by anonymous FTP -- see the instructions below.  Before anyone
asks, we are *NOT* prepared to make tapes and floppy disks for people.

Since this code is in the public domain, it is free and no license
agreement is required.  Of course, as a matter of simple courtesy, we
expect people who use this code, commercially or for research, to
acknowledge the source.  I am interested in hearing about people's
experience with this algorithm, successful or not.  I will maintain an
E-mail mailing list of people using this code so that I can inform users of
any bug-fixes, new versions, or problems.  Send me E-mail if you want to be
on this list.

If you have questions that specifically pertain to the C version, contact
Scott Crowder (rsc at cs.cmu.edu).  If you have more general questions about
the algorithm and how to run it, contact me (fahlman at cs.cmu.edu).  We'll
try to help, though the time we can spend on this is limited.  Please use
E-mail for such queries if at all possible.  Scott Crowder will be out of
town for the next couple of weeks, so C-specific problems might have to
wait until he returns.

The Cascade-Correlation algorithm is described in S. Fahlman and C Lebiere,
"The Cascade-Correlation Learning Architecture" in D. S. Touretzky (ed.)
_Advances_in_Neural_Information_Processing_Systems_2_, Morgan Kaufmann
Publishers, 1990.  A tech report containing essentially the same
information can be obtained via FTP from the "neuroprose" collection
of postscript files at Ohio State.  (See instructions below.)

Enjoy,

Scott E. Fahlman
School of Computer Science
Carnegie-Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA  15217

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To FTP the simulation code:

For people (at CMU, MIT, and soon some other places) with access to the
Andrew File System (AFS), you can access the files directly from directory
"/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/connect/code".  This file system uses the same
syntactic conventions as BSD Unix: case sensitive names, slashes for
subdirectories, no version numbers, etc.  The protection scheme is a bit
different, but that shouldn't matter to people just trying to read these
files.

For people accessing these files via FTP:

1. Create an FTP connection from wherever you are to machine "pt.cs.cmu.edu".

2. Log in as user "anonymous" with no password.  You may see an error
message that says "filenames may not have /.. in them" or something like
that.  Just ignore it.

3. Change remote directory to "/afs/cs/project/connect/code".  Any
subdirectories of this one should also be accessible.  The parent
directories may not be.

4. At this point FTP should be able to get a listing of files in this
directory and fetch the ones you want.  The Lisp version of the
Cascade-Correlation simulator lives in files "cascor1.lisp".  The C version
lives in "cascor1.c".

If you try to access this directory by FTP and have trouble,
please contact me.

The exact FTP commands you use to change directories, list files, etc.,
will vary from one version of FTP to another.
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To access the postscript file for the tech report:

unix> ftp cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu  (or, ftp 128.146.8.62)
Name: anonymous
Password: neuron
ftp> cd pub/neuroprose
ftp> binary
ftp> get fahlman.cascor-tr.ps.Z
ftp> quit
unix> uncompress fahlman.cascor-tr.ps.Z
unix> lpr fahlman.cascor-tr.ps   (use flag your printer needs for Postscript) 
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