Hi Jeff, Thanks for the clarifying points.
Apologies if certain words trigger an emotional response, but unfortunately they're all we have. I deliberately used the word "artefact" in my comments to describe the swarming, I've found that "hack" is both a better description (inside my head) and a terrible one (inside everyone else's) due to the connotation that it somehow doesn't measure up to some unspoken "standard". The process of modelling some natural phenomenon cannot proceed from zero to 100% in a flash, and we must use hacks appropriately to bridge the many gaps in understanding and modelling which necessarily exist. Hacks are not only necessary to all progress, they are the highest form of creativity as they embody the "most for the least" in a highly focussed way. Galileo, lacking the timepieces to time dropping objects accurately, hacked the problem by rolling them down a ramp, thus slowing the falling time down so he could make more accurate observations. One of the reasons why your work is already bearing fruit is that you've been prepared to attach artificial structures around the CLA in order to give it life and observe its performance. As long as these structures do the same sort of thing as the natural structures, you can make progress. This is similar to using mock objects in test-driven development - it's absolutely key to focussing on the work you need to do. The classifier is a good example. Obviously we don't have such a beast in our brains, but we do have multiple layers, hierarchy, the thalamus, attention, and all that goes with those. The classifier is a best first placeholder for all that, and it allows us to get something useful out of the CLA. That being said, I stated that the swarming process is a genetic algorithm in the evolutionary sense, in that it begins with some models and evolves them based on fitness metrics. All our sensory processing has been hardwired by evolution to some extent, and swarming is a design process which emulates this evolution in an engineering-practical timescale. Perhaps "genetic design process" is a better description. I used the example of the phoneme cull because (according to Pinker) it's a scheduled event, a phase shift in that part of the brain. This is equivalent to a change in model due to a new round of swarming, following a sufficient amount of data. It appears that this abrupt event (and many more) free up so much connectivity that it enables the next big leap in linguistic abilities. It's akin to the metamorphosis found in moths and butterflies, allowing new organs of thought to emerge from a previous generation. Stewart, The advantage of using MySQL is that the co-operating workers have a joint noticeboard. MySQL is specifically designed to handle issues like race conditions and multiple collaborating agents. It's also ubiquitous and easily installed, it's practically an OS function. Regards, Fergal Byrne On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 8:02 PM, stewart mackenzie <[email protected]>wrote: > Hi Ron, > > Great work on your hypersearch implementation! I recently went through > the code before I saw the mailing list announcement and saw your > code... "could it be!?... so soon!?" > > The video clearly gets your point across. I had to rerun the bit where > the converging points converge on the global optimal, I enjoyed it so > much! > > Kudos! > > A few questions: > - MySQL adds an extra dependency, would it not have been better to > just make use multiple flat files or keep it in memory instead? > - Why not take it a step further and directly expose the CLA via an > API and have hypersearch constantly adjust the parameters directly? So > I would imagine an always running hypersearch would scale back the > processes once the global optimum has been found, but still keep a few > hanging about double checking. Periodically based on certain data, it > could research the space to ensure the found global optimum is still > optimal. > > Kind regards > Stewart > > > > > > > On Sun, Sep 8, 2013 at 11:26 PM, Matthew Taylor <[email protected]> wrote: > > Swarming in NuPIC, with Grok engineer Ron Marrianetti: > > > > http://youtu.be/xYPKjKQ4YZ0 > > > > Enjoy! > > > > Matt > > > > _______________________________________________ > > nupic mailing list > > [email protected] > > http://lists.numenta.org/mailman/listinfo/nupic_lists.numenta.org > > _______________________________________________ > nupic mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.numenta.org/mailman/listinfo/nupic_lists.numenta.org > -- Fergal Byrne ExamSupport/StudyHub [email protected] http://www.examsupport.ie Dublin in Bits [email protected] http://www.inbits.com +353 83 4214179 Formerly of Adnet [email protected] http://www.adnet.ie
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