Read me, touch me     23 August 2001

WHAT IS NNW, NAME AND CONTENT

NNW is an acronym of Neu (neural) Net Work. It is a product of a new
form of thinking about Neural Networks. 

HOW DOES NNW WORK

NNW works different from other Neural Networks.
Originally Neural Networks were based on ideas of Donald Hebb 1950.
Subtle changing the synapses and so the connections between neurons
giving thinking was the principle of traditinal Neural Networks. In
contrast we know that our brains work with: --1. is there a connection,
2. yes? fine, 3. go on.-- There is more to do. This demo is based on that
simple idea.

WHERE TO GET IT

You can download the NNW source from the NNW website
(http://nnw.sourceforge.net). To compile it you need GTK >= 1.2 too. I
guess it'll work with version 1.0 too, but I did not try it, and you probably 
have to change something. Get GTK from your linux distribution, a bit new 
one has GTK included, look in the documentation of your linuxdistributor 
up how to install it. Alternatively you can download the GTKsource the 
GTK homepage, http://www.gtk.org. You also need GCC (or any other C++ 
compiler, NNW is written in C but uses C++ style comments) and GNU make 
(or compatible). You can get both from http://www.gnu.org.

HOW TO COMPILE AND INSTALL NNW

Download the tarball nnw-0.03.tar.gz and possibly some other required software
from the appropiate websites, and unpack them in a directory of your choice,
usually /usr/local/src. To get information about how to compile and install the
other software, please consult the INSTALL or README files in the root of the
appropiate source directories.

After installing the required software (most people will not need to install
much other software, maybe the gtk1.2 libs and development libs of their linux
distribution, change to the directory where NNW is unpacked. I take
/usr/local/src/nnw-0.03 here. Edit Makefile to suit your configuration (you
probably don't need to change much). After that run 'make'. This will create
some object files and an executable 'nnwgui'. You can delete the object files
with 'make clean'. To remove the binary, the nnnet data files, logs and backups
run 'make distclean'. To uninstall just remove the directory where you placed
NNW.

USING THE NNW DEMO

To run NNW change to the directory where it's located and run nnwgui, usually
with './nnwgui' from a Xterm under X. You can also start it from a filemanager
like kfm or gmc, but you'll not see any messages then.

When you run ./nnwgui you see appearing only a small column of knobs. First 
you can clear the NN and start at the position yet nothing learned. The second 
knob is learning the alphabet. After that you can view the network. After each 
choice you can view. Other choices are dozing and sleeping. A view can be 
enlarged in the normal way. Close the views yourself. In a laborious way you
can alter the input file snnslet and run the program.

There are three 'snnslet' files included:
snnslet1 contains only capital letters (A-Z)
snnslet2 contains only numbers (0-9)
snnslet3 contains both capital letters and numbers, note that the 0 is one row
lower here, to prevent the 0 from conflicting with O

You can just copy (or symlink) one of the files to snnslet, by default is
snnslet equal to snnslet1.

This way of installing and running NNW works already on different machines
in my neighborhood. NNW is an open source project under GPL.

NON GTK

If you want to compile the program without the gtk functions then add the parameter GTK=no to make. You can always run the non gtk version so in textmode version with alt-main.

PATTERNS

The included patterns program can convert normal text to snnslet patterns,
that could be used in nnwshop. The code to really recognize patterns isn't
there yet (the character is possibly recognized, but the output format should
be equal to the input format, normal text again).

You can test it by running './pattern infile outfile' where infile is a file
containing the defined characters (look in patterns.c for more info), and
outfile is the file where the snnslet patterns will be written to.

Please look in patterns.c for more information, but please consider that this
is work in progress, it's not yet integrated with nnwgui & stuff.

SOME ADDRESSES

Mail ameulen@users.sourceforge.net for contributions and for joining the crew
Look at http://nnw.sourceforge.net for more info about NNW

I wish you a good time                                             The makers
