Class 39: AI Experiments

Held Wednesday, April 12, 2000

Overview

Today we will play with and discuss some of the sample neural networks you've identified.

Question 39 for discussion today: Find a Web site with an illustrative example of genetic programming or neural networks. Report on the success or failure of the technique to solve the problem described therein.

Question 40 for discussion Friday: Do you consider the Turing test a reasonable way to evaluate the the success of an AI program? Why or why not?

Notes

• Here's an interesting link to some history of Neural nets: http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/book/j_anderson_1.html
• Here's a terrifying note about a .com town: http://www.pinetel.com/~half/welcome.htm
• Sam will be leading discussion on Friday. (Sam, that's a hint that you might want to do some extra preparation.)

Contents

• Investigations

Summary

Investigations

We'll start by looking at a simple (but, presumably, general) neural network designed for doing function approximation. You can find this at http://neuron.eng.wayne.edu/bpFunctionApprox/bpFunctionApprox.html.

Spend a little time playing with the applet. What do you discover? Note that you may need to resize some dialog boxes in order to get it to work. Note also that it may take some time to load.

We'll continue with some of the examples you've come up with. See your answers to today's question for the examples.