Note: Deprecated!

The designer is a strange beast: the project that is opened for editing, is also running in the background as a neural network. This means that you can use the input/output channels just like in a regular (neural network enabled) application, like the AICI client app. Grate for debugging and trying out stuff, but you don’t want to get your test data mixed into the actual network, enter sandboxes:

A sandbox is a complete copy of your project, running in a new, separate designer.

So, after you have opened the Aici project in the designer (installed at {Documents}\NND\Demos\AICI_1, note that you need to select the directory, not the file), you can run your project in a sandbox. Simply click on the button in the toolbar, or select ‘debug/sandbox’ from the menu. This will start a new designer with you sandbox project loaded. Once the sandbox is open, you can use the already declared text-channel to communicate with the network. if not yet opened, switch it on by selecting ‘view/communication channels/Text channel’ from the menu. The Echo words demo has more info on this type of channels (though the view has been updated a bit). here’s the short version:

The toolbar:
1: Send the input text to the network.
2: a combo for selecting the method to send text to the network.
3: copy the conversation log to the clipboard.
4: save the conversation log to file.
5: clean the conversation log.
6: toggle audio on/off.
The edit area:
1: All the neurons that were sent to the network as input.
2: All the neurons that were sent back from the network as output.
3: The conversation log.
4: The input box

In short, simply type some text in the textbox at the bottom, press enter and watch what happens.

When you are done testing, simply close the sandbox app and you are done (it wont ask to save any changes). If you would want to do some more testing later on with the same data, you can first save it to a different location (otherwise the sandbox data will be deleted when you start a new sandbox).