Neuristique s.a.

Neuristique was founded in 1988 by a dozen friends with big dreams. The mission statement was very long sentence that mentions the application of artificial neural networks, the development of artificial brains, and the exploration of space. We were very young and inexperienced.

This adventure had positive developments. Neuristique was in business from 1988 to 2003. The company was closed “in the black” because it structure was becoming too heavy for its activities. The technology developed by Neuristique is still used by leading companies around the world. The human side was more painful. The contrast between our inexperience and our ambitions has caused many disappointments. Friendships have been severed...

The SN Neural Network Simulator

Neuristique’s first product was the SN neural network simulation software. Yann LeCun and I initially wrote SN to support our research. We wanted a prototyping platform able to support ambitious applications of machine learning such as optical character recognition or speech recognition.

SN was basically a Lisp interpreter with highly optimized numerical routines for simulating and training neural networks. Lisp was chosen because we could write a compact and yet powerful interpreter without compromising the speed of the system. The very first version of SN already had a very fast stochastic gradient descent and convolutionnal neural networks. Thanks to many people, successive versions of SN acquired many features and libraries.

Leading R&D organizations around the world bought SN licenses. AT&T Bell Laboratories had its own internal version. SN programs were industrially deployed and are still running.

Around 1997, Neuristique released a version of the Lisp interpreter named TL3 under the GPL. In 2001, AT&T Labs released most of its modifications under the GPL. Yann and I then gathered all these incompatible freely available pieces and produced the latest descendant of SN: Lush. Almost twenty years after the initial version of SN, Lush is still going strong!