GROUPS

Layers

Groups are the mechanism of the NICO toolkit to handle the structure of the networks. In it's simplest form, a group has the same function as a so called layer, but a group is really a much more powerful object than a layer. The following example creates a group with 7 unnamed units: Groups can have sub-groups as in this example: Here we used the command Move to make the subgroups members of the supergroup. When a group (or any other object) is created, it becomes a member of the root group "network", but the following commands can be used to control the object hierarcy of the network: And the following two commands removes and renames objects: When referring to a sub-object in a network, a c-like "dot-syntax" is used. For examle, the following command: will output a description of the sub-group of "SuperGroup" even if there exists another object with the same name on the top-level. Unnamed objects can also be referred to by using the "#"-character. For example:  will output a description of the 5th object (for example an unnamed unit) of "my_layer".

Modularity

The hirarchical structure of groups makes it easy to craete modular networks. Here is an example where we make a small 3-layer network and encapsulate it in a super-group. We now have a module that can perform some small task in a bigger network. But to use it we need to connect units outside the module to the input-layer and also connect the output-layer to outside units for further processing. In a truly modular approach we don't want to specify which is the input and output units when we create these connections. Therefore groups have a property called protection. Groups protected against output connections are "receptor" groups and groups protected against input connections are "signal" groups. Groups can also be protected against all connections -- "hidden" groups -- but the default is "public", i.e., no protection. We can extend the previous examle with: Here we used the command Protect with the options -R, -P and -S for receptor, hidden and signal-group respectively. Now, if we should connect from some outside group: only connections to the input group are created, and similarly: creates only connections from the output group.