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Building Brainlike Computers

Posted by kdawson on from the cortexes-for-all dept.

newtronic clues us to an article in IEEE Spectrum by Jeff Hawkins (founder of Palm Computing), titled Why can't a computer be more like a brain? Hawkins brings us up to date with his latest endeavor, Numenta. He covers progress since his book On Intelligence and gives details on Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM), which is a platform for simulating neocortical activity. Programming HTMs is different — you essentially feed them sensory data. Numenta has created a framework and tools, free in a "research release," that allow anyone to build and program HTMs.

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  1. Interesting, but... by Bob+Hearn · · Score: 5, Informative
    Hawkins' book On Intelligence is interesting reading. There are a lot of good ideas in there. From my perspective as an AI / neuroscience researcher, the main weakness in his approach is that he only thinks about the cortex, whereas many other brain structures, notably the basal ganglia, are increasingly becoming implicated as having a fundamental role in intelligence.

    This quote from the article is telling:

    HTM is not a model of a full brain or even the entire neo-cortex. Our system doesn't have desires, motives, or intentions of any kind. Indeed, we do not even want to make machines that are humanlike. Rather, we want to exploit a mechanism that we believe to underlie much of human thought and perception. This operating principle can be applied to many problems of pattern recognition, pattern discovery, prediction and, ultimately, robotics. But striving to build machines that pass the Turing Test is not our mission. Well, my goal is to build machines that pass the Turing Test, so I have to think about more than cortex. But more generally, one might wonder how much of intelligence it is possible to capture with a system that "doesn't have desires, motives, or intentions of any kind".