Every simulation is built around a network. Networks contain layers of units, with connections between the units. PDP++ provides objects at every level of structure from the Network down to the Connection from which neural network models can be constructed. While particular algorithms will define their own sub-classes of these basic object types the essential properties of these objects are relatively constant across different algorithms. This chapter describes these basic properties.
The user's primary interaction with the PDP++ software is through the NetView, described in section 10.6 Network Viewer. This provides a graphical display of the network structure, and a means of creating and modifying the different elements of the network.
For a tutorial introduction on how to use the NetView to build and connect a network, see section 4.3 Configuring the Encoder Problem.