It's just an engineering simplification. In real neocortex, every neuron is racing against its own leakage currents, but you can get away with pretending that we have a timestep during which all the cells start from resting potential and simultaneously compete to fire.
Using an actor model, you can do away with timesteps to that extent, but it's not as easy to visualise. Regards, Fergal Byrne On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 9:08 PM, Rich Morin <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mar 5, 2015, at 12:49, Fergal Byrne wrote: > > The region itself always just predicts one step ahead. ... > > The notion of a "step" seems to imply some sort of synchronous logic, > driven by a master clock. Does the cortex actually work this way? > > Aside from curiosity, I'm asking because I've been thinking about the > problem of synchronizing the processing of an actor-based version of > NuPIC. This seems like it would need to force all of the actors to > wait for the slowest actors, message paths, etc. > > So, I'm wondering about letting the actors operate asynchronoously, > handling and firing off messages as the scheduler (etc) allows. Of > course, this would introduce some differences in the results, but > that might not be a problem. Is this a reasonable approach to try? > > -r > > -- > http://www.cfcl.com/rdm Rich Morin [email protected] > http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume San Bruno, CA, USA +1 650-873-7841 > > Software system design, development, and documentation > > > > -- Fergal Byrne, Brenter IT http://inbits.com - Better Living through Thoughtful Technology http://ie.linkedin.com/in/fergbyrne/ - https://github.com/fergalbyrne Founder of Clortex: HTM in Clojure - https://github.com/nupic-community/clortex Author, Real Machine Intelligence with Clortex and NuPIC Read for free or buy the book at https://leanpub.com/realsmartmachines Speaking on Clortex and HTM/CLA at euroClojure Krakow, June 2014: http://euroclojure.com/2014/ and at LambdaJam Chicago, July 2014: http://www.lambdajam.com e:[email protected] t:+353 83 4214179 Join the quest for Machine Intelligence at http://numenta.org Formerly of Adnet [email protected] http://www.adnet.ie
