Planet - A Neural Network Simulator
220B: Modeling Creativity - Winter Quarter, 1999


Neural Networks

PlaNet - Yoshiro Miyata

The PlaNet System is a tool for building, running, visualizing and examining a neural network. The most significant aspect of PlaNet is that it allows you to deal with building a network both in a fairly high level of abstraction and low level. Planet provides the flexibility to build networks of almost any structure and size and to run and visualize the network in many useful ways.

More details can be found in the PlaNet doc which is divided into 6 parts: doc part 1 doc part 2 doc part 3 doc part 4 doc part 5 doc part 6.

You can read the PlaNet reference manual by typing: /usr/ccrma/package/planet/PlaNet.man

Planet application consists of two executables modules: XNet and netcommmand. XNet runs a X Window graphics and netcommmand sends shell commands to the XNet. However, the csh-script RunNet which is provided, makes life easier. Thus, it is worthwhile to put into your .cshrc or (better) into your .aliase file the following line: alias planet source /usr/ccrma/package/planet/RunNet

After that, if you type "planet" from the csh prompt, the application starts and you can control it from the shell. Some conflicts between PlaNet and the shell commands may occure. For example, 'set' is both a PlaNet command and shell command. Since 'set' tends to be used often in aliases that are set up automatically, making 'set' as a PlaNet command is likely to cause unexpected conflicts. So the PlaNet command 'set' was chanched to 'nset'. Similar problem may arise with 'echo', 'print' and some other PlaNet commands. If you want to use them as shell commands, you should type 'print ...' or '/bin/echo ...'.

We suggest that you will run first the Tutorial by typing: /cs/course/aim/apps/planet/Tutorial, before you start the real work.

You can use the planet emacs mode if you set the path in your .emacs to /cs/course/aim/apps/planet/planet.el.