Lead developer exposes Natal inner-workings

[NJ5]

JaggedSac said:
And you guys are hitting on a potential positive about having the software running outside of the hardware. It is easier for updates to the knowledge base of the network. MS will most likely work with developers on the software and provide updates when necessary since each game disc will most likely have the data on it.

A neural network is basically a series of weighted nodes that take a set of inputs and output a set of output value(s). Training the network alters the weights of the nodes until an acceptable accuracy is achieved for all input sets. I did a neural network in college where the inputs(actually, the input names are irrelavent since it was just float values, the network could handle any number of inputs and any number of expected outputs) were enemy distance, ammo, health, and weapon and the outputs were attack, defend, or stay. For training purposes you provide the inputs with the expected outputs and let the system keep iterating over the training sets and altering node weights until each set is met with an acceptable outcome.

A funny story that I read once about neural networks... Some military asked for a neural network to distinguish between images of tanks and cars. It worked perfectly during the training process, and totally failed when used in reality. Why? All the pictures they took of tanks for the training were taken on a rainy day, and the pictures of cars were taken on a sunny day. So actually the neural network learned to recognize the weather, not cars and tanks as they wanted it to :D

Of course this is very unlikely happen in systems which are actually tested during development... but it's still a funny story.