The Amygdala

Okay, so I'm back. I wish I had a good excuse, but I've just been busy reading about fantastic things that I probably should have posted here. I'm new to all this, so you'll just have to bear with me. :)

Anyway, aside from the continual reading, I've been delving into a real-valued neural net designed to recognize randomness recently. With preprocessing to account for character frequency, it seems to be doing great so far at recognizing short strings like filenames. Anyway, this all originally stemmed from a conversation with a friend of mine, which also led to our looking into the amygdala and its connections with the brainstem and forebrain. He maintains that it can be modeled as a chaotic system, which means that I'm now frantically reading up on chaos theory and how to model chaos in neural networks. It is some really exciting stuff!

As for general reading, I'm working my way through Hassoun's Fundamentals of Artificial Neural Networks, reading bits of the IJCNN proceedings for 1992 (I'm particularly liking A Neural Network System Model For Active Perception And Invariant Recognition of Grey-Level Images from volume IV, and working my way through a ton of papers off of citeseer, which I think may be my new favorite web site.

Oh, and for anyone who stumbles across this and is new to neural nets, wikipedia isn't a bad place to start. I'd check out their entries on Neural Networks and on the Memory-Prediction Framework, and then go from there.