Interesting, any public pointer to your dissertation ?
it was 2004-2006, we used weight quantization as noise function and a modified levemberg-marquad for training, matlab was the hot stuff back then and by today standard everything is ancient, so there's that - the training alghorithm was changed to train toward a flatter area of the noise function, so it used the second derivative to hold gradient descent and overfitting.
I can answer specific questions if you want.