The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence

I'm very pleased to see Numenta on HN front page, as they're doing incredibly difficult and ambitious work without deep learning's spotlight. They take a philosophically very different approach: instead of warming up biologically implausible neural models from the 60s and hope that with enough data we'll reach artificial general intelligence (AGI), Numenta founder Jeff Hawkins (way before Hinton's or Hassabis's recent declarations of DL reaching a deadend) thinks we shall understand our biological neocortex better…

> A three-dimensional representation of objects also provides the basis for learning compositional structure, i.e. how objects are composed of other objects arranged in particular ways I found this particularly interesting. I have a young daughter and I find it fascinating how quickly and reliably she can learn an object and then recognise others in a way a computer just can’t do at all. Eg see very rough line drawing of an object, then recognise that animal in real life…

> It’s as if your brain is actually thousands of brains working simultaneously. I had this epiphany recently while meditating. While trying to make my brain be quiet, I realized that there were different parts that were being quite vociferous and just had a lot to say at that particular moment, a la the "inner voice" phenomena. In this one case I just let them chatter instead of whacking them into submission. And it was then that I realized that…