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

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.

[Some users have reported that changing "short-float" declarations to
"single-float" in Lucid seems to make things work better.]

Scott Crowder, one of my graduate students at CMU, has translated this code
into C.  The C version is considerably faster on most machines, but less
flexible.

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.  Specify whether you want the C or
Lisp version.  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 am maintaining an E-mail list of people using this code so taht I can
notify them of any changes or problems that occur.  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.

NOTE: This code is distributed without charge on an "as is" basis.  There
is no warranty of any kind by the authors or by Carnegie-Mellon University.

-- 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".  The internet address of this machine is 128.2.254.155,
for those who need it.

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 files "cascor1.lisp" and "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 describing this algorithm:

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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