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[15] What is NuTank?

NuTank stands for NeuralTank. It is a program to simulate complex networks and interactions. In this program one is given the shell of a 2 dimensional robotic tank. The tank has various I/O devices like wheels, whiskers, optical sensors, smell, fuel level, sound and such. These I/O sensors are connected to Neurons. The player/designer uses more Neurons to interconnect the I/O devices. One can have any level of complexity desired (640k memory limited) and do subsumptive designs. More complex design take slightly more fuel, so life is not free. All movement costs fuel too. One can also tag neuron connections as "adaptable" that adapt their weights in accordance with the target neuron. This allows neurons to learn.

The Neuron editor can handle 3 dimensional arrays of neurons as single entities with very flexible interconnect patterns. One can also design a Glyph or drawing to represent the robot and/or obstacle. (or bug, worm, whatever) One can then design a scenario with walls, rocks, fat (fuel) sources (that can be smelled) and many other such things.

Robot tanks are then introduced into the Scenario and allowed to interact or battle it out. The last one alive wins, or maybe one just watches the motion of the robots for fun. While the scenario is running it can be stopped, edited, zoom'd, and can track on any robot. One can designate a neuron group as the probe group and get a display of the neural activity of that group. This helps debug designs.

The entire program is mouse and graphically based. It uses DOS and VGA and is written in TurboC++

There will also be the ability to download designs to another computer and source code will be available for the core neural simulator. This will allow one to design neural systems and download them to real robots. This feature may be in the Beta release, around August 94. The design tools can handle three dimensional networks so will work with video camera inputs and such.

Eventually I expect to do a port to UNIX and multi thread the program. I also expect to do a Mac port and maybe NT or OS/2

The theory that I eventually want to test has to do with the self oscillating nature of combined subsumptive and standard neural nets. One can also work on flock and pack behavior.

I have a paper I've written called Artificial Cognition that discusses a theory of the combination of regular neural nets and subsumptive networks. In the shareware file it is called Paper.ps and will need to be printed on a PostScript printer. You may get copies of it by sending $5 to Keene Educational Software.

Getting NuTank: NuTank now has a shareware version. It is about 300k bytes compressed. The file is nutank.exe and is a PKZip executable for dos machines. It must be put in a directory called C:\nutank

To unpack nutank first put nutank.exe in C:

C:
mkdir nutank
cd nutank
..\nutank.exe -d
After it unpacks nutank.exe is the program If anyone would like to put it on their server feel free to do so. If you put the shareware on your sever please tell me so I can send you updates.

Nutank shareware is available at these ftp sites: ftp://cher.media.mit.edu:/pub/incomming/NuTank or ftp://ftp.essex.ac.uk:/robot/Simulators/NuTank The shareware version has the ability to write to disk disabled. Feel free to pass the shareware version around. The regular version costs $50 (includes a printed copy of the paper) and can be had by sending $50 US to

Richard Keene
Keene educational Software
8155 Lone Oak Court
Littleton, CO 80124
I am at the Park City Group and can be reached at 801-649-2221

NuTank, Copyright Richard Keene 1994, All rights reserved.


Last-Modified: Sun Aug 11 08:52:14 1996
Kevin Dowling <nivek@cmu.edu>