I’m a psychology student currently trying to redo an experimental AI program; a neural net style approach to creating an autonomous agent. I need help finding a programming language to suit my particular needs, as described below.
I’ve had a fair amount of experience in programming, mostly in Basic and VB. I began writing a program in VB two months ago, but after ~45k lines (barely halfway through) it began to get real slow. I need language I can learn fairly quickly and use to re-impliment the program. I’m not interested in converting code, I simply want to start over in a language which won’t stall on high workloads. I’ve looked into some languages like Lisp(ported onto Windows), I have no idea how to graphically maneuver around C, and have been through a whole bunch of other well meaning distractions, but all the technical terms are just Greek to me. It’s only taken me about about a month to think about asking Techrepublic for help.
I’m pretty sure there are many more qualified programmers to handle this job than myself, but for the purposes of experimentation it’s better I write the program myself from scratch, so I can fine tune it.
Here are some details which might help to understand my situation:
* I’m running Windows Vista Home Basic on a Dell Inspiron 1501 with AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile dual core ~1.6GHz, 1Gig ram
* Program was written in Visual Basic 6.0, length approx. 45,000 lines.
* Program writes output to 18 .dat files, the largest of which tends to be +20Mb.
* Neural info in these files is stored in byte sized allocations, meaning the program needs to cycle through all 20Mb several times/sec checking for certain values in order to access and modify specific neural data.(I’m guessing this contributes largely to my problem)
* When the program is fully functional, I can only expect the collective .dat files to eventually exceed 50Mb each(I have no idea if that’s even feasible, but this is an experimental software so I intend to push the limits)
* The program uses a 2D graphic output in the form of a grid. It was cakes to do this in VB, but I’m completely clueless in most other languages, particularly the largely text-based ones.
That’s the most important information. I would greatly appreciate contributions from the community. I realize I have quite a bit to learn, so I’m only asking to be pointed in the right direction, and I’ll take it from there. There is far too much information around for me to make any sense of. I simply need to find out which programming language/s (and possibly computing infrastructure) will best suit my needs.
