Neural Network on a Commodore 64
This was my most outrageous excursion into Commodore 64 programming. It's a complete neural network associative memory pattern recogniser implemented in fewer than 250 lines of BASIC. You can train the network on a variety of patterns (letters and numbers) and then recognise similar patterns. I submitted this (serially) to all of the Commodore magazines, each of which rejected it as “too esoteric”. I prefer to think of it as simply before its time.
When you first start to learn about computers, it's only natural to compare how a computer “thinks” with how people do. As you learn more, you tend to stop making such comparisons because you come to realize that far from the literal, dumb servants they're often pictured as in movies, computers are completely different from people both in how they operate and the kinds of problems they can solve.
But it's still fascinating to compare a computer to a human brain. Researchers are beginning to discover principles which may explain how the brain works, and while much of this research is extremely complicated and requires large, expensive computers, your Commodore 64 can be programmed in BASIC to mimic one fundamental part of brain function, pattern recognition. In doing this, your computer is not only doing something the brain does (and your reaction may be “I didn't know a computer could do that!”), it's doing it the brain's way—by simulating the neurons (brain cells) with which you think.
.png)
