Cascade-Correlation code available

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

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For those of you who want to play with the Cascade-Correlation algorithm, a
public-domain Common Lisp version of my Cascade-Correlation simulator is
now available for FTP via Internet.  This is the same version I've been
using for my own experiments, except that a lot of non-portable display and
user-interface code has been removed.  I believe that this version is now
strictly portable Common Lisp.  It has been tested on CMU Common Lisp on
the IBM RT, Allegro Common Lisp (beta test) for Decstation 3100, and
Sun/Lucid Common Lisp on the Sun 3.  (In the Lucid system it runs properly,
but it spends a lot of time garbage-collecting, so it is very slow; maybe
there's some optimization magic in Lucid that I don't know about.)

The code is heavily commented, so if you read Lisp at all it should be a
straightforward task to translate the program (or just the, inner loops)
into the language of your choice.  A couple of people have told me they
planned to port the code to C, and would share the result, but at present
no C version is available.

Instructions for obtaining the code via Internet FTP are included at the
end of this message.  If people can't get it by FTP, contact me by E-mail
and I'll try once to mail it to you in a single chunk of 51K bytes.  If it
bounces or your mailer rejects such a large message, I don't have time to
try a lot of other delivery methods.

I would appreciate hearing about any interesting applications of this code,
and will try to help with any problems people run into.  Of course, if the
code is incorporated into any products or larger systems, I would
appreciate an acknowledgement of where it came from.

There are several other programs in the "code" directory mentioned below:
versions of Quickprop in Common Lisp and C, and some simulation code
written by Tony Robinson for the vowel benchmark he contributed to the
benchmark collection.

-- Scott
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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.  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 Cascade-Correlation simulator
lives in "cascor1.lisp".

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.