Hierarchical Temporal Memory

As seen on Slashdot: Jeff Hawkins (founder of Palm Computing) has written an article entitled Why can't a compute be like a brain. He covers progress since his book On Intelligence and gives details on Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM), which is a platform for simulating neocortical activity. Numenta has created a framework and tools, free in a "research release," that allow anyone to build and program HTMs.

Given a few days of free time it would be interesting to dabble with this stuff. Some noteable quotes from the article:

"Perhaps we've been going about it in the wrong way. ... Even so-called neural network programming techniques take as their starting point a highly simplistic view of how the brain operates."

"It is clear to many people that the brain must work in ways that are very different from digital computers. To build intelligent machines, then, why not understand how the brain works, and then ask how we can replicate it?"

I like this line of thinking, although I think I can answer the question of why computer scientists have shied away from the brain... let's be serious... if we had any reasonble success in figuring out how it works, then sure, we'd focus on it.

"My colleagues and I have been pursuing that approach for several years. We've focused on the brain's neocortex, and we have made significant progress in understanding how it works. We call our theory, for reasons that I will explain shortly, Hierarchical Temporal Memory, or HTM."

"The neocortex is a thin sheet of cells, folded to form the convolutions that have become a visual synonym for the brain itself."

"Because of the neocortex's uniform structure, neuro-scientists have long suspected that all its parts work on a common algorithm-that is, that the brain hears, sees, understands language, and even plays chess with a single, flexible tool."

"HTM is a theory of the neocortical algorithm."

If these guys are right, then watch out. But I've got my skeptics hat on.