CompAnn

Anne is a very limited procedural programming language which nevertheless has some interesting features like native and language-level parallelisation and asynchonous execution constructs. It was designed as a front-end language to be compiled into ANNs (see the Wikipedia article).

ANNs have some interesting properties, and there are two main reasons for why it could be interesting to compile some code into a neural network performing "it":

Neuro-Evolution:
It can serve as a starting-point for evolutional processes resulting in a possible speed-up of the process and this could have other advantages as compared to starting with fully random ANNs.
Parallelism:
ANNs are, if not simulated on a classical computer, totally parallel in their "execution"; this means that Anne as a language compiled to ANNs has "native" support for massively parallel execution of code without any performance limitations and costs. While that is of course purely theoretical as the resulting ANNs will be simulated on a classical computer and loose this property there, this fact is still quite interesting and fascinating.

I'd consider the project being in beta-state; it already works basically and as a proof-of-concept including some example projects to verify that evolution still works well for "compiled" ANNs and documentation about the found results, but there's still much work to be done to get some piece of software that can be released as a 1.0-version.

June 30th, 2008
Finished translation of the User Manual to English. Additionally, very basic support for arrays has been added to SAM, the Anne support will follow.
June 28th, 2008
Finished translation of the Technical Internals documentation to English! I've taken up this project again and plan to implement array-support, eventually making Anne turing-complete. With this new features I want to start a new evolution-project and work further on improvements.

Originally this project was designed for a submission to the Jugendinformatikwettbewerb of the Austrian Computer Society, therefore the documentation was written in German; now I've started translating it to English, but it's still some part missing. Available documentation:

The current testing release is available for download at the Sourceforge project page, as well as more information and a description of anonymous read-only Subversion access to the development source.

I'll love to hear your comments, suggestions and ideas for improvements and whatever else as well! Feel free to contact me: Daniel Kraft

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