Gauge Overview
One of the main methods for studying the activity of the network component in Simbrain is by using the gauge component. Each gauge is an instance of a program called HiSee. HiSee is a high dimensional visualizer. As a neural net operates its state travels along a path in its state space which typically has many dimensions. Hisee can take the collection of states which are visited by a neural net and project them down into two dimensions so that many of their geometric and topological properties are preserved. This gives users of Simbrain a way to visualize the behavior of the network component. More information about HiSee is available at the HiSee website: http://hisee.sourceforge.net .
This gauge represents the states (patterns of activity across the nodes of the network) that have occurred in a network with 40 neurons. Each green dot corresponds to one of those states. The red dot represents the current state. For the most part, points that are close to each other in the gauge correspond to states that close to each other in the network's 40-dimensional state space.
When Simbrain is running users can add one or more gauges windows, each of which projects some subset of the network's state variables to two dimensions. This allows users to independently study different aspects of the network component. For example, one gauge might represent the activity at the input nodes of a network, another might represent activity at the hidden nodes, another might represent the aggregate activity of the entire network, and another might represent the changing values of the network's weights as it learns.