Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!samsung!olivea!mintaka!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!mcsun!hp4nl!dutrun2!galaxy!wouter From: wouter@duttnph.tudelft.nl (Wouter Schmidt) Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets Subject: Re: Neuralworks Professional II Plus Message-ID: Date: 14 May 91 08:00:33 GMT References: <1991May11.232140.24961@ncs.dnd.ca> <5690@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> Sender: news@dutrun2.tudelft.nl Lines: 45 At our research group we bought Neuralworks Professional II Plus running on a Sun 4 platform. We agree that this software is usefull as long as you use the standard buildin network paradigms to solve your application. It is visually a very good tool for demonstrations and may serve as a good intro- duction environment to neural networks. However as a pure research tool it is (for our group) of no use. Try for example to implement the back propagation rule for radial basis functions or to implement a complete new network paradigm within neural works. Our experience is that most of your coding effort is wasted to understand and to implement the neural works requirement. The documentation on this subject is poor and if your 'new' idea does not work you do not know if you made a programming error or your 'new' idea is of no use. A succesfull implementation of a new network idea depends on a number of software layers in neural works and modification must be done in all of these layers. An understanding of your adaptions to the software may not completely be clear due to the complex software structure. As argued before in this newsgroup if you are doing research in developing new neural networks techniques you will often end up coding your own neural networks environment in a general purpose language like C or C++. This argument still holds for neural works professional ! Neural works does not support batch processing. A workstation is occupied as long as your simulation takes because the software requires a graphics window open. In our group we must share workstations and long simulations (which is quite often the case in the neural networks learning) prevent other users to login and use their own environment. Furthermore a three year license and supports costs us about US $14.000. The latest update we got does not seem to be much more than a change in the user interface, which is not much value for money for this expensive software license. I (we) agree with the previous posted statement: > I have not looked in detail at the other NN models, but from a brief > overview, I would say that the product is best used as an educational > tool, that is using it to illustrate the different models, rather than > for real applications. -- +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Wouter Schmidt FI-PH | | | Pattern Recognition Group, | Room : 229 | | Faculty of Applied Physics, | Phone : 31-(0)15-78 46 94 |