🧠 emergent | C++ Neural Network Simulator

6/4/26 Update: I have confirmed that a frontier model can get emergent working on Ubuntu 26.04 and Qt6.*.

emergent is a comprehensive neural network simulator that enables the creation and analysis of complex, sophisticated models of the brain.

📑 Table of Contents

• 🚀 Overview
• 💻 Installation & Setup
• 💡 Usage
• 🐛 Issues & Support
• 🤝 Contributing
• 📄 License

🚀 Overview

emergent is a comprehensive neural network simulator that enables the creation and analysis of complex, sophisticated models of the brain in the world.

Warning

We are no longer developing this software. We are now developing a new framework based on the Go language, with a Python interface: https://github.com/emer/emergent

Neural Network Simulation Features

• Full browser and 3D GUI for constructing, visualizing, & interacting.

  • Accessible to non-programmers
  • Highly productive for experts, used daily in scientific research.

• Powerful C++ scripting language, css (not that css), GUI Programming environment (IDE) -- TypeAccess access to C++.

• Rich, dynamic, embodied environments for training networks:

  • DataTable for network inputs and DataProc, DataAnal, DataGen (filtering, grouping, sorting, dimensionality reduction, graphing, etc).
  • Newtonian physics simulator for Virtual Environment, e.g., a biophysically realistic human arm, and realistic embodied, dynamic vision.
  • Sensory filtering for vision, audition, and vocal-tract speech.

• Many classic neural network algorithms and variants: Backpropagation (e.g., deep convolutional neural networks), Constraint Satisfaction, Self Organizing, and the Leabra algorithm which incorporates many of the most important features from each of these algorithms, in a biologically consistent manner. Also, symbolic / subsymbolic ACT-R.

• Highly optimized vector-based back-end code with thread-specific memory allocation, and GPU (CUDA); Convenient compute cluster for GUI-based job control and data management.

• In use for decades, for hundreds of scientific publications from a variety of different labs. Detailed models of the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, visual cortex, cerebellum, etc.

  • Direct descendant of earlier simulators: PDP (1986) and PDP++ (1995).

💻 Installation & Setup

Prerequisites & Dependencies

• The main dependency files for current releases are found in: https://github.com/emer/cemer/releases/tag/v8.5.1

Basic Setup

Main documentation is here: https://grey.colorado.edu/emergent -- basic install and build information is on the Github Wiki.

• The current release built from github sources (source code only) is: https://github.com/emer/cemer/releases/tag/v8.6.1
• The latest release with built packages is: https://github.com/emer/cemer/releases/tag/v8.5.2, released Feb, 2018.
• This github repository was converted from the svn original, and has captured the full history of git tags (including historical dates!) in: https://github.com/emer/cemer/tags

💡 Usage

To run the emergent GUI after installation, you can launch it via your command line interface.

# Example execution of the emergent GUI
emergent --project my_network.proj

🐛 Issues & Support

If you encounter any issues or have questions regarding this deprecated repository, please refer to the Issues page or consult the wiki documentation. Note that support may be limited due to its deprecated status.

🤝 Contributing

Contributions to improve the documentation or fix critical bugs are welcome. Please ensure your pull requests follow the standardized coding style and open an issue for major changes before contributing.

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.

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