I had a TOT (Tip Of the Tongue) experience last night when watching my roommate play Paper Mario. The bob-ombs in one of the settings are dressed distinctly (look at the lower left corner here and here). During the 2002-2003 winter, I sometimes wore a beanie with a hoodless sweater. I was taking Latin during the time, and during office hours my Latin professor once asked why I was dressed like a stevedore. Having grown up in the desert all my life, I had never heard of the word, so I learned a new word that day. But last night I thought about it a good five minutes and still couldn't remember that word to describe the bob-ombs. I tried using a thesaurus (and stumbled across this, which is pretty cool), but I didn't know any real synonyms for it (shipyardman?, dock worker?). I was at a loss for the word. Anyway, after about ten more minutes of just sipping my tea, thinking about it, and watching my roommate play more of Paper Mario, it suddenly came to me. Victoria Mea!
So the whole TOT thing got me thinking about neural networks and the storage capacity and retrieval ability of the brain. I remember learning a bit about some of the models in my "Second Langauge Acquisition: From Childhood to Adolescence" and "Lingustic Typology" courses, but haven't looked into neural networks much since then. With the release of AI-NeuralNet-Simple-0.10, maybe I'll be able to learn a bit more about it. Any thoughts on what else will help me start playing around with programming neural networks?
