Welcome to the Amygdala Spiking Neural Network Library project.
The primary home page for this software can be found at http://amygdala.sourceforge.net and the development home page is located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/amygdala.
For basic installation instructions see the "INSTALL" file.
There are a number of examples in the samples/ directory. Their use is described in the user handbook which you need to download separatelly from the Amygdala homepage. There you also find doxgen API documentation (similar to JavaDoc) and design papers.
Amygdala requires libxml2 which comes with Gnome. It is installed on most if not all recent Linux systems by default. You also need the command line utilities "gzip" in the search path in order to load and save networks.
Amygdala is developed on Linux/x86 and OSX Tiger using the GNU Compiler Collection. Version 3.x and 4.x of g++ is supported. Solaris/Sparc 8.0 and AIX 5.1 has also been tested with the GNU toolchain.
On Unix platforms (including OSX), Amygdala has a GUI plugin which allows you to watch the network running.
Platform notes:
- OSX
To compile Amygdala you need to install the xcode packages which come with the installation DVDs.
If you want to run the samples or your applications with Visual you need to create a proper directory structure to run a Carbon App from after compiling the lot. For the spikeloop application you would do:
$ cd amygdala/samples/spikeloop
$ mkdir -p spikeloop.app/Contents/MacOS
$ cp .libs/spikeloop spikeloop.app/Contents/MacOS
$ `pwd`/spikeloop.app/Contents/MacOS/spikeloop --visual
- Windows
There are plenty of ways to get Amygdala running on Windows. By far the easiest way is to build and run it in the Cygwin environment where it runs out of the box.
MinGW also works but is quite painful to install. In addition to MinGW
itself you need:
- The MSYS add on to MinGW
- libxml-2
- pkgconfig and an appropriate pkgconfig entry for libxml-2.0.
- the Berkeley Socket library which is part of the Unix Tools for
Windows package.
The Microsoft compiler used to work at Amygdala-0.2 but hasn't been tested since. Other environments have never been tested.
Limitations: Linking into a DLL is not supported on Windows. The implication is that Visual will not work on Windows at all.
- AIX
The version 1.5 of libtool I got from the IBM produces an error when linking binaries against libamygdala. This can be fixed by recreating the symbol table in libltdl.a : # ar -s /opt/freeware/lib/libltdl.a
Compiling the CVS version
If you checked out the sources from CVS you need to have a complete and recent version of the GNU autotools to generate required files. Run:
$ libtoolize && aclocal && autoheader && automake --add-missing && autoconf
and then proceed with the steps in INSTALL
OSX Note: libtoolize is named 'glibtoolize' in xcode package.
Additional Notes
The Amygdala Library is still in a stage of heavy development. At this point in the project, the API is likely to change from version to version. Most changes to existing interfaces will be small and easy to adjust for, but there will occasionally be major changes to some areas. Please report any bugs by using the bug tracking system on the development home page. Suggestions for improvements are welcome.