(no subject)
Well the psych class turned out to be not as useful for me as I thought it would be. From the course catalog it sounded like we would mainly be discussing the theory behind modeling cognition using neural networks etc., but instead it's more of a lab course with weekly projects involving training a network to do a specific task. And I certainly don't have the time this semester to be doing that when I have my *own* research to work on. Also, rather than using an already-available program like PDP++ or Lens to set up and train the networks, the prof was going to have us write them from scratch in Matlab. I don't think I would get much out of that, since I've already done that kind of thing before (in Lisp, though, not in Matlab). It probably would be easier to do stats and understand how my own networks are functioning if I do them in Matlab, though, since I can do both training and plots right from the same program, whereas with Lens I have to output the data to a file, and then read it in to R to do my visualizations and whatnot. The prof said the student version of Matlab isn't too expensive (about $50 or so), so I'm debating picking up a copy for myself....or possibly using one of the free clones, like Octave or RLab.