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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.

3 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Interesting, but... by CogDissident · · Score: 4, Interesting

    He means it doesn't have desires and motives in a conventional sense. The way it works mathamatically means that it seeks the lowest value (or highest, depending on the AI) for the next nodal jump, and finds a path that leads to the most likely solution.

    This could be "converted" to traditional desires, meaning that if you taught it to find the most attractive woman, and gave it ranked values based on body features and what features are considered attractive in conjunction, it would "have" the "desire" to find the most beautiful woman in any given group.

    I'd say that researchers need to learn to put things into layman's terms, but all we need are good editors to put it into simpler terms, really.

  2. What mistakes do machine learning machines make? by totierne · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I take drugs for bipolar tendency and have had 5 nervous breakdowns, so I have some ideas about how the brain goes wrong, I am afraid that the search for a perfect machine learning device may be a side track compared to explaining the mistakes the brain makes.

    I have an engineering degree and a masters specialising in machine learning - but that was 13 years ago, I would be delighted in more pointers of the state of the art

    http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/Resources/disordermodels/ , on bipolar and neural networks, seemed promising at one stage but I had not the time, energy or rights to read the latest papers. [The web page is dated 1996]

    --
    Be Free: Free Software Tuition
  3. Re: been there, done that... by Black+Parrot · · Score: 3, Interesting

    However, in the very specific field of machine learning, virtually all papers published are about support vector machines and similar methods Sorry, but that is simply wrong. No, laughably wrong.

    Browse the ToCs of some recent journals and conference proceedings on ML, RL, EC, NN.

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    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade