FaxGroup was a company formed by an entrepreneur for the purpose of Artificial Intelligence research. The results of this research was intended to be used by the owner's other companies. I was in charge of and performed research for FaxGroup into artificial intelligence techniques. In particular, this research concerned methods of optimization for neural nets using back propagation and conjugate gradients and the use of stochastic methods such as Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithms. The intended applications are proprietary information and confidential, but I can say that they concerned market and train recognition applications. This research was fully successful.
While at FaxGroup I used Unix as an applications programmer. However, Unix was eventually abandoned because it was not capable of giving the necessary support for the research development (using the 3B2 platform). I also attended several conferences on neural nets and massively parallel processors. I found that the field had many good ideas which were undeveloped, and in many cases other researchers had tried application of the basic ideas unsuccessfully. I was able to surmount these problems since the major problems were a lack of creativity in the use of the appropriate methods.
These applications were written in C++ (Glockenspeil's Commonview) and designed to run on PC-class machines. I also examined many different supercomputer architectures for use in the research.
While at FaxGroup, Inc. I learned a great deal about Neural Nets, Genetic Algorithms and Simulated Annealing. I also learned C++ and was exposed to Unix. I further had to brush up on many of my neglected mathematical skills since some of the work required substantial mathematical ability.
Project completion, the company was closed down.
Intel 8086 assembler
C
C++
IBM AT/386 clone
AT&T 3B2 Unix system
MsDos
Microsoft 8086 assembler
Microsoft C compiler (versions 4.0 and 5.0)
Glockenspeil's C++ compiler
Glockenspeil's Commonview
Microsoft Windows
Elliot Wheeler (540-344-8737)