FANN was originally written by Steffen Nissen. Its original implementation is described in Nissen's 2003 report
Implementation of a Fast Artificial Neural Network Library (FANN). This report was submitted to the
computer science department at the
University of Copenhagen (DIKU). In his original report, Nissen stated that one of his main motives in writing FANN was to develop a neural network library that was friendly to both fixed point and floating point arithmetic. Nissen wanted to develop an
autonomous agent that can learn from experience. His goal was to use this autonomous agent to create a virtual player in
Quake III Arena that can learn from gameplay. Since its original 1.0.0 version release, the library's functions have been expanded by the creator and its many contributors to include more practical
constructors, different
activation functions, simpler access to parameters and
bindings to multiple programming languages. Project maintenance was initially since 2003 done on
SourceForge, but since 2011 it has been maintained using the
Git version control system hosted on
GitHub. The project was inactive from Nov 2015 to May 2018; in the issue section some users mentioned that the author was no longer contactable. Since 2018, development has become active again with contributions from several collaborators. == Research ==