Friday, August 31, 2007

Learn Like A Human

Published by Jeff Hawkins
IEEE Spectrum magazine, April 2007

By the age of five, a child can understand spoken language, distinguish a cat from a dog, and play a game of catch. These are three of the many things humans find easy that computers and robots currently cannot do. Despite decades of research, we computer scientists have not figured out how to do basic tasks of perception and robotics with a computer. Our few successes at building "intelligent" machines are notable equally for what they can and cannot do. Computers, at long last, can play winning chess. But the program that can beat the world champion can't talk about chess, let alone learn backgammon. Today's programs-at best-solve specific problems. Where humans have broad and flexible capabilities, computers do not. Perhaps we've been going about it in the wrong way. Click for more...

[G.K Comment: An excellent article by Jeff Hawkins on Hierarchical Temporal Memory. ]

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This happens to be one of my favorite books, and I think your description has done it justice. The Numenta website display more educational material about HTMs, and even the software product.