In one of the panel discussions Chris Adami asked the audience what would be their response if someone claimed to have understood the brain. The beffuddled looks on our faces betrayed our scepticism. Adami then said that it was Jeff Hawkins that figured it all out, on his book 'on intelligence'. I found it a lovely reference and looked for glimpses of it over the web. I found a comment on the book by Peter Dayan, who wrote one of the standard textbooks on computational neuroscience (he is the leading the homonimous department in UCL). Though I haven't read on intelligence yet, I found Dayan's comment was strangely reassuring, as it rephrases the results in a bit more balanced manner, by bringing up a couple of the contingencies on the 'final understanding'. I thought it is definitely worth a read, specially for those of us that might have turned a little dismayed to be out of jobs, as the brain was already explained. There is still hope, according to Dayan some of the mystery is still there.
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0020394If you are considering buying the book, perhaps you would also like to check the video of the presentation he delivered on the 'Almaden Institute' of IBM on computational neuroscience. This is a link to the video in google:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2500845581503718756
1 comment:
Furthermore, if you want to see more about the technical details of Jeff's brain ideas, see the Numenta website. In particular, look at the Biological Mappings screencast (http://www.numenta.com/for-developers/education/biological-background-htm.php), and the various whitepapers found on the website.
Post a Comment