Re: Interfacing through C++ program

["Randall C. O'Reilly" <oreilly@grey.colorado.edu>]

"Josh Hursey" <hursejo@earlham.edu> writes:
> So I have battled through creating and training my BP ANN, and it is
> working well (Knock on wood). The problem that I now face is that of using
> it as a part of a larger program. I need to beable to call my ANN, input a
> set of data (prepared by a C++ program), feed it through the net and
> gather the output activation levels which will be passed to the C++
> program for interpolation.
> It is unclear to me after reading the documentation how to do this. Any
> help would be greatly appreciated.

The short answer is that pdp++ does not easily support embedding at
this point.  You have two main options:

1. the core nnet code for bp++ has been extracted in the
   demo/bench/pdp++bench benchmarking program -- you could use this as
   a basis for inclusion in your own program.  however, it does not
   read/write PDP++ network/project files, etc, so you'd have to write
   your own code for that.  Also, it doesn't have any of the
   process/enviro stuff -- maybe that is a good thing for embedded
   apps anyway?  It seems to me that for an embedded app you could
   use any bp code -- its pretty simple to write in like 20 lines of
   code or something -- almost all the code in pdp++ is about all the
   interfaces, processes, environments, logs, etc!

2. you could be a hero and #ifdef out all of the gui stuff from pdp++,
   and link the resulting libraries to have full access to pdp++
   within your own program.  these #ifdefs are in place for src/ta in
   some of the files, to allow the maketa program to compile w/out
   interviews, but that's about it..

				- Randy