Why can't a computer be more like a Brain?
February 21st 2008 21:00
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Jeff Hawkins, renowned inventor, says computers today are fast at solving calculations but terrible at doing things that children can do, like understanding simple stories or recognizing the difference between a cat and a dog.
That's because computers are designed with Von Neumann architecture, with a processor connected to memory. The brain, by contrast, has a very different design. It is a "hierarchical memory system."
At the lowest level, the brain's neural connections store memories such as the shape of an object. At the next level up, the pattern associated with a human form is stored. And at the highest level, the brain recognizes the person as Bill Clinton.
The brain operates on the same formula, or algorithm, in every region, according to Hawkins. You are born with nothing and learn. Each part of the brain learns based on what information is passing through it.
"This is a basic blueprint for how the memory system works," he said.
"What this does is you build a hierarchical model of the world," he said.
When shown a crude picture of a helicopter, Numenta's software can recognize it 19 percent of the time. But when the helicopter is moving and several frames of the memory are stored together, the software can recognize the helicopter 52 percent of the time, Hawkins said.
The goal is to create a computer that is efficient at learning to recognize things, improves itself over time, can be generally used across a lot of different industries and has an ability to make predictions.
"The goal is not to build humans, but to solve problems that are much harder" than what humans can solve, Hawkins said.
Adapted from MercuryNews.com Dean Takahashi
So where does all of this leave US. Inferior to those superior computers, I suspect, so let's just hope they never achieve a 100% PLUS capacity of Man's brain.
After that, the body should be easy. Then how will we know whether we are talking to one of US or whether what we see in front of us is one of THEM.
Just some thoughts to ponder upon.
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