Building Brainlike Computers 251
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.
End of civilization (Score:5, Funny)
Re:End of civilization (Score:4, Funny)
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I don't know how to break this too you gently so I'll just be blunt. If you're someone who is capable of developing super-sexy bots then it doesn't really matter whether you're interested in actual sex or not.
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Re:End of civilization (Score:5, Funny)
That is, unless you want your old doll to get jealous of the new one and steal half your money and burn your house down.
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2. Have computer lock itself in the bathroom, crying.
3. ???
4. End of civilization?
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DON'T DATE ROBOTS!
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Oh, I don't know. When she can have a doll that has size-as-you-please parts, is 100% attentive, never gets tired, soft, rude, disinterested, or puts her aside for beer, football, or poker, never pines for or asks for sex acts she doesn't prefer, doesn't put her at risk for disease, pregnancy, heartbreak, political argument, never looks at other women... she may not be all that int
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would that make us the smartest or the stupidest creature ever to have come out of the evolution theory?
Well, let me turn the question around on you. We evolved from (something very like) Australopithecus, but those creatures don't actually exist anymore. So does that mean they were dumber than crocodiles? Crocadiles haven't really evolved all that much. They are still around after a hundred million years. But I don't think they are smart be
pwned by cut/paste (Score:2)
I have a beowulf cluster of these things... (Score:2, Redundant)
How long before... (Score:4, Funny)
Interesting, but... (Score:5, Informative)
This quote from the article is telling:
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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It makes me think of fetuses. Isn't there learning before birth. I remember videos of fetuses sucking their thumbs and reacting to the light from the fiber optic camera. Clearly they have sensation, sucking their own thumb, and curiosity, reacting to outside stimulus. Is that what is missing?
I don't know. I'm not in the fie
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:4, Informative)
Off-Topic (Score:4, Funny)
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No disrespect, but don't you see the fact that none of you can all agree on anything (within this domain) as a bad sign? You're all bright individuals. But it's very similar to the fact that philosophers don't uniformly agree on any philsophical viewpoint. That's because there's nothing concrete that can be said in that domain, as has already been understood for centuries by
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"This is the best model we have at the present for this particular problem. Here are a list of problems with the theory(a, b, c...). Feel free to suggest refinements and contribute new analyses of it."
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However, neuroscience is different from philosphy, because there is a real, physical object there to study. New experimental techniques appear every year. Eventually, we will know how brains work.
Neuroscience is different from physics, precisely because, as you have pointed out, brains are very messy things. Physicists are luc
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The Secret of AI Is Aready Here! (Score:2)
Not to mention, motor coordination, attention, short and long-term memory, cerebellar processes, etc... It's a little more complicated than Hawkins would have us believe, especially if you don't already know the answers. Fortunately, the sec
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Please go on.
Would you like it if they were not a lot of good ideas in there?
Why do you say your perspective as an ai neuroscience resea
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I guess what many of us wants, is a breakthrough.
While it's possible that the brain really is of irreducible complexity, and that to get anything useful, you really have to emulate the full brain, that would be a pretty unique phenomenon in the history of science. Most inventions are not made by researchers sitting on their asses making up elaborate theories, until they suddenly starts to construct a pentium processor, or F-15 figh
End of civilization??? (Score:2)
Can't build what you don't understand (Score:4, Insightful)
Alchemy (Score:5, Insightful)
Medievals didn't understand the atom or crystalline structures, but they still made carbonized steel for armour. They had the wrong ideas about exactly how metal became properly carbonized and tempered, but they still came up with correctly tempered spring-like steels (IIRC similar to tempered 1050) without getting any of the "why" of it right.
I think someday we will be viewed as the medievals of AI. We occasionally make progress even though we really don't know what we're doing. Yet.
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a "full understanding" isn't necessary (Score:5, Insightful)
Hawkins and the people he's working with have come up with an approach that lets people explore possible uses of allowing a machine to learn in a way that's inspired by a process that may be part of how humans learn. They don't need a "full understanding" of how the human brain works to do that.
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Recognition Is a Small Part of the Problem (Score:3, Interesting)
While I believe that the HTM is indeed a giant leap in AI (although I disagree with Numenta's Bayesian approach), I cannot help thinking that Hawkins is only addressing a small subset of intelligence. The neocortex is essentially a recognition machine but there is a lot more to brain and behavior than recognition. What is Hawkins' take on things like behavior selection, short and long-term memory, motor sequencing, motor coordination, attention, motivation, etc...?
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Much experimental evidence supports the idea that the neocortex is such a general-purpose learning machine.
Actually just as much evidence contradicts that hypothesis. We have very specific brain areas for generating and processing verbal data (Broca and Wernicke's areas), and a very specific brain area for recognizing faces. There a
In Defence of Hawkins (Score:3, Interesting)
In defence of Hawkins, note that he does not disagree (RTA) that there are specialized regions in the brain. However, this does not imply that the brain uses a different neural mechanism for different regions. It only means that a region that receives audio input will specialize in processing
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I agree. I doubt that Hawkins can use his HTM to recognize (let alone understand the meaning of) full sentences. For that, you need a hippocampus, i.e., the ability to hold things in short-term memory (and play them back internally) and to parse events using a variable time-scale mechanism. You also need a mechanism of attention wh
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Even more alarms go off whenever I see someone try to 'model the neocortex'. I'm in the camp that we kn
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Much experimental evidence supports the idea that the neocortex is such a general-purpose learning machine.
I don't think that is anywhere close to representing the scientific consensus. A lot of scientists believe that the brain is specially adapted to solving specific problems [ucsb.edu] that were important for our ancestors' survival. For example, humans seem to solve logic problems involving social exchange [ucsb.edu] in very different ways, and using different neural circuitry, than problems that have the same formal-logic
airplanes with feathers and flapping wings? (Score:2)
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early jumpbo jets used the landings of pigeons as a basis for example - those techniques are still used
But if.... (Score:2)
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Absolutely (Score:2)
The key thing is that is a complete working system we're not "making" it anything in the sense we make a desktop computer do something. If we were, it wouldn't really be brain-like. Instead, we're causing something brain-like to have proto-experiences. When the hardware (and low-level software) gets to be far more brain-like, to the point where from a logical top
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Short answer: yes
Long answer: Yes. But what do you mean by insane? It could be argued that someone who is, e.g. a sociopath or homicidal is simply someone who deviates from the norm. (In fact, many people, including prominent psychiatrists argue this view). One can then argue how far people must deviate before it's deemed they have a psychiatric disorder. The typical answer given by psychiatrists today is that it'
And we shall call it Epicac (Score:2)
What mistakes do machine learning machines make? (Score:3, Interesting)
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/ [cmu.edu] , 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]
Dreyfus (Score:2)
What I don't understand about Numenta (Score:2)
1. Self driving vehicles as in the DARPA driving challenge
2. Computer vision for autonomous robots
3. Image classification systems (even for desktop apps)
4. Voice recognition systems
Numenta claims HTMs are very powerful and yet instead of attacking one of these problems either as a demo (so they can be swept up by Google in the bat of an eye) or for profit, Numenta is giving away a dev. platform with
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On the other hand, it's also possible that Hawking has reasons to believe that it really does work, and just wants to seed the robot revolution by releasing this... Maybe his only real self-interest is in wanting to see intelligent robots/applications in his own lifetime, and he realizes that the best w
Can't our brain be like a big relational database? (Score:2)
For example, to 'decide' whether an object is a ball:
if(object = round){
if(sphere = perfect){
if(pattern = checkered){
random([soccerball,art][weight10,weight1])
}
}
}
And deciding on the feedback we get: (if positive
Re:this is stupid (Score:5, Funny)
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Shhh! Nobody tell him they actually did it [pbs.org]!
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a) mice are the scientists beta testers or
b) there is an inherint risk in the growth procedure that is deemed irresponsible to burden a human with.
Overheard from a computer on a bbs in 2231... (Score:2)
Blasphemy! To believe that a lowly monkey man created our brains a few hundred years ago!? Madness I say! And illogical too! Everyone knows that our 'souls' came into being by miraculous inception. I believe it involved a lighting strike on an Intel fabrication plant, or perhaps it was AMD (computer god rest their soul). Regardless, the monkey men are only good for distilling into basic nutrients to fuel our sacred circuit boards.
I have spoken! As for that so called 'theory of evolution', everyone
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1949073.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Re:this is stupid (Score:5, Informative)
How does that follow? Granting, for the sake of discussion, that everything in the natural universe, including brains, was created by God, that hardly implies that we can't copy brains. We can reproduce many naturally occurring things, after all, through understanding their structure and composition.
Diamonds are things made by God, and we can copy them.
Re:this is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Regardless of there being a God, brains, humans, birds, or diamonds, to be honest we don't want to create a brainlike computer.
Human brains can do amazing things, but one thing we like about computers over human brains is that human brains, even the best ones, are simply wrong from time to time, and our goal with "brainlike computers" is not to recreate these mistakes, but rather to overcome them.
With respect to our senses, again, they are amazing, but then again they are fooled much of the time. There are perceptual errors, optical illusions, selective memories (ask 10 eye witnesses and get 10 different accounts), and all of that.
Today, computers are great at being calculators, and for storing and retrieving digital data. They suck at making "decisions". Even seemingly trivial ones like telling the difference between an apple and an orange is difficult for a computer today.
Take a look at much more mature technologies, like flying. For ages, humans tried to make flying machines like birds, and now we have a handful of flying technologies that can fly faster than the speed of sound and can go beyond the earth's atmosphere. But we still can't fly like a bird with flapping wings, and I don't remember a time in my life where I saw a headline saying "Building Birdlike Planes".
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And it's not only because the primary motivation is to overcome human failings with regard to decision making. We also don't want fully brainlike computers because they would want things like we want, such as freedom to choose whether they will bother to try solving your problem for you or not. They must remain tools, and if they can have our level of consciousness they would need to be kept as slaves. A tool cannot be allowed to argue about being sh
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The thing is, computers can already do lots of things that brains are bad at. Making brainlike software that all
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Hav you ever flown on a bird? I'm sticking with rigid wings, thanks.
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Stir and then let sit for ~9 months. Boom, there's your human mind.
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Well that explains an awful lot. =\ Oh well, was fun trying again and again and again to make a baby so I suppose it wasn't a total loss anyway. Now, off to find someone with a uterus!
And thanks for your help!
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The question isn't "will we?", the question in reality be: "should we?" Do we have the right to dissect the creations of god and dupllicate them? Sure, I see no reason not to. There are cert
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Ok, according to moore's law we will get there, with a transistor based computer. I believe the idea is to create the hardware equivelant of a neuron. Something like Asimov's positronic brain. Currently the modern computer is little more than a highly programmable calculator. The idea in this case is to create a computer that can learn or repurpose it's transistors/neurons.
My colleagues and I have been pursuing that approach for several years. We've focused on the brain's neocortex, and we have made significant progress in understanding how it works. We call our theory, for reasons that I will explain shortly, Hierarchical Temporal Memory, or HTM. We have created a software platform that allows anyone to build HTMs for experimentation and deployment. You don't program an HTM as you would a computer; rather you configure it with software tools, then train it by exposing it to sensory data.
The end goal is to create more advanced computers or software. You'd do better vent
Re:this is stupid (Score:5, Funny)
Can't be too careful... (Score:2)
We certainly don't want god coming after us for IP infringment...the MAFIA is bad enough and they only have lawyers!
On a more serious note though why not? Pretty much everything we have done as a species to date is copying some process which occurs naturally in the universe. Since we learn by copying why not learn from the best?
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Mod parent UP! (Score:2)
Seriously! This is one of the funniest posts I've read all day!
Whooboy, "It's heresy!" That's a good one!
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However, you weaken your own point by bringing up "heresy". You're not going to sway anybody that way. Nobody gives a crap about heresy. A heretic belief is one that that goes against the beliefs of some (religious) authority. Big deal. Those authorities are a
Actually, computer brains will be far superior (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worth stating that unless you believe that the human brain contains magic (which 99% of your religious bretheren don't), then it is no more than a very complex arrangement of perfectly ordinary physical components, namely atoms and molecules. And if you don't think that we will in due course be able to arrange atoms and molecules as we wish, then you're very blinkered to the direction in which science and engineering are heading.
That said, the recreation of human brains is merely an interesting challange as far as practical engineers are concerned, and not a practical approach. The vast majority of us have no intention of actually taking that route because protein is such an inferior building material. Your alleged god (aka. blind evolution) only "chose" it because carbon is so damn versatile in conjunction with O and N and H, so a million different reactions occurred in the mess of the primordial soup. And one of them happened to work.
Well we don't rely on blind chance, but coerce the reactions in the direction we want, which gives us the chance to choose our materials more strategically. And we will.
There's not a chance in hell (trying to use your frame of reference here) of us producing "brains" that are *MERELY* as good as nature created in humans, because the equations that underpin ordinary physics and chemistry (and therefore molecular nanotechnology) say otherwise. Instead, you can expect "brains" a billion times our mental capacity and a trillion times our mental speed in due course. We know that it's possible (from theory, and by observing protein nanomachines doing it very poorly), but we lack the infrastructure to do it ourselves at present. It's many decades away, but hey, we're working on it.
You'd have to contradict the maths and physics of materials and biotech that says that MNT is possible before you can validly say that it's not. And with the intellectual depth of your contribution above, my guess is that you won't.
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This has to be a wind up.
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Nothing anywhere near the level of a human, but there is no reason it can't be done.
If you want to get philosophical, if us programmers are god to AIs, and we are just the creations of our god, is our god just the creation of another god above him? Could we ever make a
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Can you really stand by this claim? I mean, do you believe you grew your own brain? If you said you grew that plant sitting in the pot on the shelf, I would believe you because you watered it regularly, etc. But when the cells started to divide in your mother's womb, where were you?
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The paragraph in question:
"So, before you go off and read your king james edition of the bible, assuming your one of those blind-eyed, deaf-eared christians from the bible belt (and ooh boy, if you ever did any "real" research on the history of that thing you would know why so many people are becoming atheists), try using that brain you built yourself."
What do you object to? His bigotry?
A bigot can still have a point. If you research the history of the bible even just casually you discover that basical
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While the Hebrew bible instructs you to make an exact copy, this in fact is not what happened, and even mode
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Well, yes and no. I think both you and the Numenta people are wrong about this (them saying that the failing of AI is that it ignores the brain). Here is my brief take on the history of AI and machine learning:
First, AI ignored the brain. Then, Neural Networks took off in the 80's, and during the 90's were also the 'hot thing' in AI and machine learning. Basical
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People don't use neural networks because they not as easy to train as SVM (given that you're given libSVM or equivalent). However, SVM are basically template matchers, which are good for problems where the number of samples is big compared to the dimensionnality of the pro
Re: been there, done that... (Score:4, Interesting)
Browse the ToCs of some recent journals and conference proceedings on ML, RL, EC, NN.
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It's time for that 'overlords' quote, I think.
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Artifical intelligence may be ok for artificial problems, but what if you have a real problem?
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And if you pour ink on a folded page and unfold it, people think they see all sorts of things in it. What was your point again?
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