[Computer-go] Numenta

[Mark Boon]

Somehow reading this list has fallen off my radar...

I looked at the Numenta stuff some years ago. Jeff Hawkins' book "On Intelligence" is an inspiring read and has some really good insights. So when he started Numenta I had considerable expectations. However, what I thought were the most interesting insights, mostly related to feedback loops, were completely eliminated from the actual implementation. That combined with the fact that the pattern recognizer only works when a pattern is shown in every possible location and orientation to be universally recognized is a big drawback. I don't believe that's how the brain does it at all. Initially I thought it was just because they were just starting. But a couple of years later it was still the same.

In the years since some advances may have been made by Numenta of course, but none that caught my attention.

From the book I got some ideas on how to use massive feedback loops to do natural language understanding, but unfortunately I haven't had time to explore. It may be just a red herring as well.

    Mark



> On Feb 18, 2015, at 2:34 AM, Petr Baudis <pasky at ucw.cz> wrote:
> 
>  Hi!
> 
>> On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 12:26:50PM -0800, Michael Alford wrote:
>> I thought some of you might be interested in this:
>> 
>> http://numenta.com/#hero
> 
>  Did you mean to link to just the home page?
> 
>> Here's a short teaser :)
>> 
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RojcnwnEzSQ
> 
>  I guess it's not strictly on-topic, but I think I should add that
> Numenta is actually a bit controversial in machine learning circles,
> at least it was when I last checked it out, since they have a lot of
> theory and marketing but not so many results to motivate it...
> See e.g.
> 
>    http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/25lnbt/ama_yann_lecun/chisjsc
>    http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/25lnbt/ama_yann_lecun/chj9pwm
> 
> -- 
>                Petr Baudis
>    If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely
>    you'll do important work.  -- R. Hamming
>    http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
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