"Sectioned" lesson files

Have specific questions about how to work with certain MemBrain features? Not sure about which checkbox in MemBrain has which effects? Want to know if a certain functionality is available in MemBrain or not?

Your questions will be appreciated here!
Post Reply
gparis
Posts: 11
Joined: Sun 2. Jan 2011, 16:24

"Sectioned" lesson files

Post by gparis »

Hello,

I'm beginning to learn to use Membrain. My aims are twofold:
1) Teach a few tutorials on connectionism starting in 10 days. We used to use tlearn, but development has stopped a long time ago and the binaries are getting difficult to install on new Windows versions, so I'm looking for a replacement
2) Possibly use it for my PhD thesis instead of Lens, if need be. At the moment I'm happy with Lens, which was suggested by one of my advisors, but SOMs have been mentioned as part of plans, in which case I may switch to MemBrain
Lens isn't "graphical" enough for a beginner's tutorial on connectionism, which is why I would prefer to use MemBrain if I switch from tlearn for the tutorials, and Lens development has stopped, too, and there is no community to ask for help, which would be a reason to switch to MemBrain for my thesis.

After this longuish introduction, here comes my first question: Is it possible to add comments within sectioned CSV files? It's nice that patterns can be formatted with line breaks as you wish, but adding comments would be even better, e.g. to specify what each pattern corresponds to in case of distributed representations.

Here is a secondary one, not as important as the first: Pattern names are optional and the docs say they can be applied to "one or more patterns". So what if you want to skip a line, e.g. specify a name for the first and third pattern but not the second one? (The same thing applies to pattern comments.)

Thanks in advance for your help,
Garance
User avatar
Admin
Site Admin
Posts: 438
Joined: Sun 16. Nov 2008, 18:21

Re: "Sectioned" lesson files

Post by Admin »

Hi Garance,
gparis wrote:Is it possible to add comments within sectioned CSV files? It's nice that patterns can be formatted with line breaks as you wish, but adding comments would be even better, e.g. to specify what each pattern corresponds to in case of distributed representations.
It is not possible to add comments in the line where they belong to. However, the sectioned CSV file has a separate section for Pattern Names and Pattern Comments where a comment and a name for each pattern can be placed.
gparis wrote:Pattern names are optional and the docs say they can be applied to "one or more patterns". So what if you want to skip a line, e.g. specify a name for the first and third pattern but not the second one? (The same thing applies to pattern comments.)
You've actually discovered a bug here, I'll try to fix this in the next rev of MemBrain: A pattern name or comment may currently not be left empty. An empty line will cause MemBrain to confuse the relationship between the patterns and their names/comments. The term 'optional' in the docs means that the whole section is optional, i.e. it may or may not be present during the import into MemBrain.
Instead of an empty line you should put some placeholder instead. MemBrain uses '---' as a placeholder or default value. You can see this when you export a lesson with some patterns into the sectioned CSV file format.

Regards
Thomas Jetter
Post Reply