Software Reviews : NeuralWorks Professional II/PlusPublisher: NeuralWare Inc.,Penn Center West,Building Iv,Suite 227,Pittsburgh,PA 15276;412-787-8222;FAX [phone] Year of Publication: 1991 Version Reviewed: 4.04 (MS-DOS version) Materials: 4 5.25" diskettes,36o-page Neural Computing reference text,352-page Reference Guide manual,138-page Using NWorks step-by-step tutorial,50-page Pc System Guide Price: $1,895 plus $340 annual maintenance fee except $3,995/$720 for Sun version;a limited version called NeuralWorks Explorer ($99) is available for educational uses for Macintosh or MS-DOS Machine Specificity: 80286 MS-DOS machines or higher,Macintosh,SUN workstations,IBM Rs6ooo,and others System Requirements: MS-DOS 3.2 or higher;640K RAM plus 1MB extended memory (2MB on 80386 machines);hard drive with at least 4MB free disk space;VGA,EGA,extended CGA,or Hercules graphics adapter;math coprocessor recommended for 80286 machines,required for 80386 machines;mouse highly recommended Effectiveness: Excellent User-Friendliness: Good to excellent: still an advanced package,but highly improved in user-friendliness for novice and intermediate users Documentation: Good

Abstract

Version 3.1 of NeuralWorks Professional II was reviewed by Carl Grafton in SSCORE in Spring 1991, but sufficient changes have occurred with the release of the "Plus" version that this review update is appropriate. NeuralWorks now features a new user interface with completely rewritten user input/output. For developers it is significant and useful that this interface is now the same across all platforms. The central thrust of the interface is a tool palette that gives users a powerful set of utilities and tools for creating or modifying neural networks. Secondarily, the interface features a simplified menu system, including icon-based menus for editing processing entities (PES), layers, and other network aspects. These new features address problems of limited user-friendliness noted by Grafton in the previous review.