John, Just to make sure that all your questions have been addressed directly:
On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 2:55 AM, John Blackburn <[email protected]> wrote: > "performs with true intelligence" is a pretty bold claim. If this is > the case, how come there are no very convincing examples of HTM > working with human like intelligence? The Hotgym example is nice but > it is really no better than what could be achieved with many existing > neural networks. Echo state networks have been around for years and > can make temporal predictions quite well. People define "intelligence" in different ways. If you take for granted that the neocortex has "true intelligence", then HTM might be called an implementation of "true intelligence" algorithms based upon the fact that it acts upon incoming data with the same basic principles as the neocortex. We are trying to lift the intelligence out of the brain and into software, one step at a time. So, while NuPIC's performance might not seem all that impressive when other technologies can do similar things, we have lots of room to grow [1] and a lot more work to do. All of this upcoming work should increase the capabilities of the HTM system we are implementing. The fact that we are somewhat on-par with some other ML techniques at this point is encouraging to me. > I recently presented some > time sequence data relating to a bridge to this forum but HTM did not > succeed in modelling this (ESNs worked much better). I had a little time to work on your bridge tilt data [2], but not enough to make it useful. I still think this problem presents a relevant challenge for HTM, and I think with more time and effort, someone might be able to create a real solution. I, unfortunately, have other projects I have to work on. :( > So outside of > Hotgym, what really compelling demos do you have? I've been away for a > while so maybe I missed something... My current favorites are location-based anomaly demos like these: - https://github.com/nupic-community/mine-hack - https://github.com/numenta/nupic.geospatial I am also working on a new tutorial, coming within a couple weeks (hopefully). > I am also rather concerned HTM needs swarming before it can model > anything. Isn't that "cheating" in a way? It seems the HTM is rather > fragile and needs a lot of help. The human brain does not have this > luxury it just has to cope with whatever data it gets. Swarming is hard to explain. In the brain, input data to the neocortex comes from sensory organs, which have been tuned by millions of years of evolution to have very specific characteristics that process incoming light, sound, movement, etc. into certain patterns of nerve excitations. These patterns get generated outside the cortex, but they are still important to attempt to replicate in some ways. All data in "reality" must be represented to the cortex somehow outside of that reality. In NuPIC, this is what encoders so. They translate data coming into them into a representation similar to a vector of nerve excitations. Anyway, swarming is a very rough way to simulate evolution in the sensory organs. It randomly sets up encoders with different parameters (also spatial pooling and temporal memory parameters) and tries to find the best possible set of configurations for the specific data that is being processed. Your cochlea have had millions of years to come to that perfect set of configuration parameters ;). Swarming is a brute-force attempt to resolve some set of parameters for a specific input data set. It is not always right, it takes a long time, and it sometimes requires manual intervention, but it definitely very useful for finding groups of configurations that work well for certain types of data. > I'm also not convinced the neocortex is everything as Jeff Hawkins > thinks. I seriously doubt the bulk of the brain is just scaffolding. > I've been told birds have no neocortex but are capable of very > intelligent behaviour including constructing tools. Meanwhile I don't > see any AI robot capable of even ant-like intelligence. (ants are > amazing!) Has anyone even constructed a robot based on HTM? While I know nothing about bird brains, except that they have a cerebral cortex that has some similarities to the mammalian cortex, I do know that hierarchy in the neocortex is a generally accepted theory in neuroscience. We could still learn a helluva lot from the lower levels of the brain (imagine a flight vehicle that could control itself as efficiently as a fly), that just isn't what we're trying to do at Numenta. > Personally I don't think a a disembodied computer can ever be > intelligent (not even ant-like intelligence). IMO a robot (and it must > BE a robot) needs to be embodied with sensory-motor loop at the core > of its functionality to start behaving like an animal. You don't need to have physical interaction with the world to have behavior. There are millions of actions that can be taken on the internet that all have consequences, change the landscape for the actor, and present different possible actions in return. The most obvious example is video games, but the internet in general is a very large universe with no physical structure, but endless virtual structures to interact with. [1] https://github.com/numenta/nupic.research/wiki/Current-Research-Tasks [2] https://github.com/nupic-community/bridge-tilt Regards,
