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.
Interesting, but... (Score:5, Informative)
This quote from the article is telling:
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:airplanes with feathers and flapping wings? (Score:3, Informative)
early jumpbo jets used the landings of pigeons as a basis for example - those techniques are still used
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Recognition Is a Small Part of the Problem (Score:3, Informative)
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-logical structure but that don't involve detecting social cheaters.
Re: been there, done that... (Score:3, Informative)