Quick survey: Cascor and Quickprop

Wed Jun 9 13:46:48 EDT 1993

Distributing code by anonymous FTP is convenient for everyone with decent
internet connections, but it has the disadvantage that it is hard to keep
track of who is using the code.  Every so often we need to justify our
existence to someone and need to show them that there are a non-trivial
number of real users out there.

If you are now using, or have recently used, any of my neural net
algorithms or programs (Quickprop, Cascade-Correlation, Recurrent
Cascade-Correlation), I would very much appreciate it if you would send me
a quick E-mail message with your name, organization, and (if it's not a
secret) just a few words about what you are doing with it.  (For example:
"classifying textures in satellite photos".)

For those of you who don't know about the availability of this code (and
related papers), I enclose below some instructions on how to get these
things by anonymous FTP.

Thanks,
Scott

===========================================================================
Scott E. Fahlman			Internet:  sef+ at cs.cmu.edu
Senior Research Scientist		Phone:     412 268-2575
School of Computer Science              Fax:       412 681-5739
Carnegie Mellon University		Latitude:  40:26:33 N
5000 Forbes Avenue			Longitude: 79:56:48 W
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
===========================================================================

Public-domain simulation programs for the Quickprop, Cascade-Correlation,
and Recurrent Cascade-Correlation learning algorithms are available via
anonymous FTP on the Internet.  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.

Instructions for obtaining the code via FTP are included below.  If you
can't get it by FTP, contact me by E-mail (sef+ at cs.cmu.edu) 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.

HOW TO GET IT:

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
"ftp.cs.cmu.edu".  The internet address of this machine is 128.2.206.173,
for those who need it.

2. Log in as user "anonymous" with your own ID as 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".  NOTE: You
must do this in a single operation.  Some of the super directories on this
path are protected against outside users.

4. At this point FTP should be able to get a listing of files in this
directory with DIR and fetch the ones you want with GET.  (The exact FTP
commands you use depend on your local FTP server.)

Partial contents:

quickprop1.lisp		Original Common Lisp version of Quickprop.
quickprop1.c		C version by Terry Regier, U. Cal. Berkeley.
backprop.lisp		Overlay for quickprop1.lisp.  Turns it into backprop.
cascor1.lisp		Original Common Lisp version of Cascade-Correlation.
cascor1.c		C version by Scott Crowder, Carnegie Mellon
rcc1.lisp		Common Lisp version of Recurrent Cascade-Correlation.
rcc1.c			C version, trans. by Conor Doherty, Univ. Coll. Dublin
nevprop1.15.shar	Better quickprop implementation in C from U. of Nevada.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tech reports describing these algorithms can also be obtained via FTP.
These are Postscript files, processed with the Unix compress/uncompress
program.

unix> ftp ftp.cs.cmu.edu (or 128.2.206.173)
Name: anonymous
Password: <your user id>
ftp> cd /afs/cs/project/connect/tr
ftp> binary
ftp> get filename.ps.Z
ftp> quit
unix> uncompress filename.ps.Z
unix> lpr filename.ps   (or however you print postscript files)

For "filename", sustitute the following:

qp-tr			Paper on Quickprop and other backprop speedups.
cascor-tr		Cascade-Correlation paper.
rcc-tr			Recurrent Cascade-Correlation paper.
precision		Hoehfeld-Fahlman paper on Cascade-Correlation with
			limited numerical precision.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following are the published conference and journal versions of the
above (in some cases shortened and revised):

Scott E. Fahlman (1988) "Faster-Learning Variations on Back-Propagation: An
Empirical Study" in (\it Proceedings, 1988 Connectionist Models Summer
School}, D. S. Touretzky, G. E. Hinton, and T. J. Sejnowski (eds.),
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Los Altos CA, pp. 38-51.

Scott E. Fahlman and Christian Lebiere (1990) "The Cascade-Correlation
Learning Architecture", in {\it Advances in Neural Information Processing
Systems 2}, D. S. Touretzky (ed.), Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Los Altos
CA, pp. 524-532.

Scott E. Fahlman (1991) "The Recurrent Cascade-Correlation Architecture" in
{\it Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 3}, R. P. Lippmann,
J. E. Moody, and D. S. Touretzky (eds.), Morgan Kaufmann Pulishers, Los
Altos CA, pp. 190-196.

Marcus Hoehfeld and Scott E. Fahlman (1992) "Learning with Limited
Numerical Precision Using the Cascade-Correlation Learning Algorithm" in
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, Vol. 3, no. 4, July 1992, pp.
602-611.