Synapses

Full Synapse Icon Direct Synapse Icon Delay Synapse Icon Sanger Synapse Icon Kohonen Synapse Icon

These components allow the user to choose the type of synapse that connects two layers.

In the toolbar there are several buttons shown above, representing two main types of synpase, these are supervised synapses and unsupervised synapses.

Note : Users should not mix, unsupervised and supervised network elements. Doing so will result in unspecified behaviour and your network will be useless. On the other hand you may first train an unsupervised network and embed it into the start of supervised i.e behind the supervised components. You can do this by exporting the unsupervised network after training and loading it into a Nested ANN component. This component must be placed before any supervised components i.e immediately after the input synapse.


Supervised Synapses

Unsupervised Synapses

To use these components, the firstly selects the tool button corresponding to the synapse required, then drag a line from one layer to another in the drawing area. The newly inserted synapse will be shown with an arrow containing a small box at its centre, as in the following figure:

synapses sample

The box contains a label indicating the type and state of the synapse. The available types are shown the following table:

 F  = Full Synapse
 D  = Direct Synapse
-1  = Delayed Synapse
 S  = Sanger PCA Synapse
 K  = Kohonen Synapse

If the little box is greyed, then the synapse is disabled, indicating that this branch of the net is interrupted. To disable a synapse, right-click it and set the 'Enabled' property in the property panel to false. This feature is very useful in the designing of a neural network to try several architectures on the fly.