Good stuff. I think I know where my next area of research is going to be for a while. I was screwing around with some game development in my spare time, and I finally realized (as the UNIX type I am) writing GUI's bore me and I want to get back to my math/engineering type origins.

A fine example too. I still think it's a little scary when the inputs are not neccessarily mathematical (i.e. "octagon edge detectors", as input to the "stop sign detector" problem), but I need to tackle the essential mathematical problems first to get a better understanding of the fundamentals. After all, I know how edge detectors are written, and finding octagons can be a neural net that would feed ANOTHER neural net, used to determine where the octagon was a stop sign.

Cool on so many levels. Thanks again. Now I have motivation! (Umh, flyingmoose, you need to get back to work...)