Friday 20 July 2007

Can a New Theory of the Neocortex Lead to Truly Intelligent Machines?



The hyperactive kid of the Neuroscience class, Jeff Hawkins says he’s mapped out the way the human brain works, and has begun to fashion thinking machines to emulate the process. It comes down to Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM). Basically, he says, our brains take sensory inputs from the world and build a set of beliefs around the causes of those inputs. “Discovering causes is the pinnacle of what brains do,” says Hawkins. But getting good at this kind of “fancy pattern recognition” is something developing humans seem to do effortlessly, and computers only with immense labor.

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