BECCA 7 release

[Brandon Rohrer]

Dear BECCA Users,

I hope you're all having a great start to your New Year.

I'm excited to announce a major new release of BECCA. After 7 months, and some fundamental changes to the core algorithms, it's running faster than ever and achieving unprecedented performance on the benchmark.

Major changes:

• It has a new model-based reinforcement learning algorithm (cerebellum.py)
• The deep neural network (cortex.py) used for automatic feature engineering has been changed quite a bit. It is now an even sparser network, and it forces sparse representations.
• The most intense computations are now run using numba (numba_tools.py). BECCA is faster than ever.

Here are the results of a run on the suite of benchmark tasks.

Download BECCA 0.7.0 and run the benchmark. Email me and let me know how it went. bro...@gmail.com, @_brohrer_

Brandon