Abstract: A BASIC program for the simulation of artificial neural networks was implementedon a 386SX. For classification and recognition of infrared(IR) spectra of extracts by means of aneural network, a back propagation model with one hidden layer and a sigmoid transfer function hasbeen proved to be available. The nine features selected by the Shannon information content were usedas input elements. The hidden layer contains 21 nodes and the output layer contains one node.