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Bill is in Ed Killeens Machine Learning New Ventures Group:
From: BUFFER::LEARN2::MUTH "Bill Muth OGO1-2/W11 U11 276-8710" 20-JUL-1990 21:03:18.15
To: BUFFER::YIPPEE::MCGREGOR
CC: MUTH
Subj: RE: Base level EXCALIBUR technology
George,
Regarding your questions:
>1. (I think I asked you this, if so sorry!) Does or will EXCALABUR make
>available their base-level NN technology, or is the basic RTL specific to
>text storage and retrieval?
We do not have access to Excalibur's base-level neural network
technology, only the TRS RTL. The RTL currently available is designed
for text only.
>2. DO or will EXCALABUR have equivalent callable products in the other
>"application areas" you mentioned eg signal processing, and vision?
>In the same form e.g. a RTL?
Excailbur was working on three different run-time libraries last year,
the Signal Recognition System (SRS), Text Retrieval System (TRS) and
Vision Recognition System (VRS). As of last November, they had stopped
work altogether on SRS and VRS to concentrate on TRS and TRS-based
applications like PixTex. I don't think SRS or VRS will be available in
the forseeable future.
>3. What NN product (third-party or internal) do we (you) recommend to customers
>who want to buy a product?
No one has asked us for software recommendation! We primarily use our
own tools for neural net work, or transfer technology we've funded
(MCC). As a service group, when asked how to solve a problem, we
recommend our services.
>Are there Digital products in the pipeline?
There are no neural net programs that I know of. Our group was working
with a piece of harware called PAM, a Parallel Associative Memory, which
had similiar functionality to neural networks. This project has been
put on hold, partly due to lack of funding and partly due to advances in
traditional computer hardware (i.e. RISC workstations).
>Can we get the NN stuff from MCC which you are using?
The software that MCC used was based on software distributed with the
book "Parallel Distributed Computing" (PDP) by McClelland and Rumelhart
(MIT Press). This book came with floppy disks containing several
programs (C source code plus binary code for the IBM PC) for training
and recognition using neural nets. The directory
LEARN1::SYS$PUBLIC:[MISC] contains the following PDP code (for DIGITAL
internal use only):
PDP.ARC - Executable version for IBM PC (PC ARC format)
PDP.SAV - Contents of PDP.ARC, plus C source code and VMS
executable code (VMS save set)
There is further discussion of PAM and the PDP software in the NOTES
conference TURRIS::NEURAL_NETS (contact Ruby BUFFER::Li for membership).
If you would like the exact code that MCC used, contact Ed Killeen.
Hope this helps.
Bill
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