The Spiral Problem

Briefly, this is an example of a very hard pattern recognition problem. The data are the x and y coordinates of two spirals. In the actual data file the coordinates for each spiral have an additional number associated with them which denotes to which spiral the coordinate belongs to (i.e., 1.0 for one spiral and -1.0 for the other). The two spirals coil three times around the origin and around one another. The goal of this example is to train the network to map an #tex2html_wrap_inline3211# coordinate into the proper spiral. The network is trained by giving it x and y and the target classification for some of the points along these intertwined spirals. For a detailed description of this problem, see Lang and Withbrock [#1##1#].