ANNSER - A Neural Network Simulator for Education and Research

I've just launched ANNSER on GitHub.

ANNSER stands for A Neural Network Simulator for Education and Research.

It is licensed under the MIT license, so it can be used for both Open Source and Commercial projects.

ANNSER is just a GitHub skeleton at the moment. I have some unreleased code which I will be committing over the next few days.

I'm hoping that ANNSER will eventually offer the same set of features as established ANN libraries like TensorFlow, Caffe and Torch, and I would like to see a GUI interface to the ANNSER DSL.

ANNSER will be implemented in Dyalog APL. The GUI will probably be implemented in JavaScript and run in a browser. All the code will run on the Raspberry Pi family, though you will be able to use other platforms if you wish.

There's a huge amount of work to complete the project but we should have a useful Iteration 1 within a few weeks.

Why APL?

I have several reasons for choosing APL as the main implementation language.

1. It's my favourite language. I love Python, and I've used it since the last millennium, but I find APL more expressive, performant and productive.
2. With APL you can run serious networks on the $5 Raspberry Pi zero. This makes it very attractive for educational users.
3. APL was created as a language for exposition.
4. APL is unrivalled in its handling of arrays, and ANN algorithms are naturally expressed as operations on arrays.

Consider the following code fragments. Each creates a random input vector, creates a matrix of random weights and then calculates the output of a sigmoid neuron.

Python version

import random
from math import exp


def random_vector(cols):
    return list([random.random() for i in range(cols)])

def random_vov(rows, cols):
    return list([random_vector(cols) for j in range(rows)])

def dot_product(v1, v2):
    return sum((a*b) for (a,b) in zip(v1, v2))

def inner_product(vov, v2):
    return list([dot_product(v1, v2) for v1 in vov])

def sigmoid(x):
    return 1.0/(1.0+exp(-x))

def sigmoid_neuron(vov, v2):
    return list([sigmoid(x) for x in inner_product(vov, v2)])


mat = random_vov(3, 4)
vec = random_vector(4)
print sigmoid_neuron(mat, vec)

numpy version

from numpy.ma import exp
from numpy.random import random
from numpy import array, inner


def random_vector(cols):
    return array([random() for i in range(cols)])


def random_mat(rows, cols):
    return array([random_vector(cols) for j in range(rows)])


def sigmoid(m, v):
    return 1,0+1.0/(1.0+exp(-inner(m,v)))

mat = random_mat(300, 400)
vec = random_vector(400)
s = sigmoid(mat, vec)

APL

mat ← 0.01×?3 4⍴100
vec ← 0.01×?4⍴100  
sn  ← {÷1+*-⍺+.×⍵}
mat sn vec

I know which I prefer :)

Contributing

If you think you might be interested in joining the ANNSER project, comment below or ping me at romilly dot cocking at gmail dot com