I’m just now reading How to Build a Brain. I was excited to hear the description of Nengo 1.4, which (according to the book) was simply a matter of downloading a zip file, unzipping it, and double-clicking the application icon.
However, since then it has apparently devolved into a pure Python program that must be installed with pip and then run via Python (and depending on having a bunch of other stuff correctly installed). And not surprisingly, when I follow the directions I just get two pages of stack dumps.
Is there any chance of getting a neatly packaged, self-encapsulated GUI app again?
Barring that, is there anywhere I could download Nengo 1.4 (for macOS) so I can follow along with the book?
We have looked into this, and unfortunately, there currently aren’t many good options for packaging the Python-based Nengo in this manner. Nengo was originally targeted towards the machine learning and data science community, and we moved to the Python platform as it afforded better compatibility and interoperability with other tools that are widely used (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, SciPy, NumPy, etc.).
In my reply to your other post, I included instructions on how to get Nengo1.4 working on a MacOS (at least, it works on mine). For completeness, you can download Nengo1.4 from the Nengo1.4 GitHub page.
I should note that all of the example in the book (that were built in Nengo1.4) have been translated over to the latest version of Nengo. You can find them within the NengoGUI here (under built-in examples → hbb_tutorials in the GUI), and as Jupyter notebooks here.
