Jeff Hawkins' Cortex Sim Platform Available

UnreasonableMan writes "Jeff Hawkins is best known for founding Palm Computing and Handspring, but for the last eighteen months he's been working on his third company, Numenta. In his 2005 book, On Intelligence, Hawkins laid out a theoretical framework describing how the neocortex processes sensory inputs and provides outputs back to the body. Numenta's goal is to build a software model of the human brain capable of face recognition, object identification, driving, and other tasks currently best undertaken by humans. For an overview see Hawkins' 2005 presentation at UC Berkeley. It includes a demonstration of an early version of the software that can recognize handwritten letters and distinguish between stick figure dogs and cats. White papers are available at Numenta's website. Numenta wisely decided to build a community of developers rather than trying to make everything proprietary. Yesterday they released the first version of their free development platform and the source code for their algorithms to anyone who wants to download it."

Comments

Future Plans

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone needs to put this Cortex Simulator in an 8-legged, hydraulic-actuated, 10 ton spider-machine. If you think that's a crazy idea, you suck.

Re:Future Plans

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently someone thinks it's a crazy idea. That bastard.

Enter the Matrix

[mastershake_phd]

NEOcortex - Begin the Matrix jokes/analogies now...

Life's work

[CarpetShark]

But hey, he made a lot of money off Palm, that gives him way more street cred than people who have been working on this problem for their whole lives.

Some people spend their entire adult lives trying to overcome alcohol addiction, or trying not to beat their spouse. To others, it comes naturally.