Emergent (formerly PDP++) is neural simulation software that is primarily intended for creating models of the brain and cognitive processes. Development initially began in 1995 at Carnegie Mellon University, and , continues at the

University of Colorado at Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado sy ...

. The 3.x release of the software, which was known as PDP++, is featured in the textbook ''Computational Explorations in Cognitive Neuroscience''.

Features

Emergent features a modular design, based on the principles of

object-oriented programming Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of ...

. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Darwin /

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

. C-Super-Script (variously, CSS and C^C), a built-in C++-like interpreted scripting language, allows access to virtually all simulator objects and can initiate all the same actions as the

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

, and more. Version 4 and upward features a full 3D environment for visualizations, based on Qt and

Open Inventor Open Inventor, originally IRIS Inventor, is a C++ object-oriented retained mode 3D graphics toolkit designed by SGI to provide a higher layer of programming for OpenGL. Its main goals are better programmer convenience and efficiency. Open Inven ...

. Robotics simulations are made possible by integration with the

Open Dynamics Engine The Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) is a physics engine written in C/C++. Its two main components are a rigid body dynamics simulation engine and a collision detection engine. It is free software licensed both under the BSD license and the LGPL. O ...

. A plugin system allows for expanding the software in many ways. Version 5 introduced parallel threading support, numerous speed improvements, a help browser featuring an interface to the project's Wiki and auto-generated documentation, undo and redo using diffs and a definable undo depth. In addition, 5.0.2 introduced a built-in plugin

source code editor A source-code editor is a text editor program designed specifically for editing source code of computer programs. It may be a standalone application or it may be built into an integrated development environment (IDE) or web browser. Source-code ed ...

, and plugins can now be compiled from the main interface, enabling full development of plugins within Emergent. Emergent also provides an implementation of

Leabra Leabra stands for local, error-driven and associative, biologically realistic algorithm. It is a model of learning which is a balance between Hebbian and error-driven learning with other network-derived characteristics. This model is used to mathe ...

which was developed by Randall C. O'Reilly in his PhD thesis.

Bibliography

* *

References

Neural network software Science software for macOS Science software for Windows Science software for Linux Free science software Software that uses Qt {{Linux-stub

Features

See also

Bibliography

References