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Interesting the bird analogy again - “airplanes don’t flap their wings” was in a recent article by Jeff Hawkins describing Numenta's approach (http://spectrum.i
by jonmc12 9y ago
Interesting the bird analogy again - “airplanes don’t flap their wings” was in a recent article by Jeff Hawkins describing Numenta's approach (http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/what-intelligent-machines-need-to-learn-from-the-neocortex http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/what-intelligent...). Vicarious co-founder Dileep George was also a co-founder at Numenta. Perhaps they have similar philosophies to approach but Numenta modeling the Neo-cortex while Vicarious modeling the entire brain?
- boltzmannbrain 9y agoNo, quite different approaches and goals.
- teabee89 9y agoThey agree on the bird analogy, except Numenta (IMHO rightfully) thinks you can't come up with airplane designs without having understood how birds actually fly.
- arketyp 9y agoBack in the Dileep George days Numenta sought mathematical support for their theory in a Bayesian approach à la Judea Pearl. But I don't think they ever had any illusions that the brain explicitly performs statistical calculations. Hawkins et al. at Numenta are now embracing the theory of sparse distributed representation, developing upon the work of Pentti Kanerva as a formal foundation. It's biologically much more plausible, but technologically less feasible (with the current hardware paradigm). I suspect Dileep George in the end was more eager to put the theory into use.
- skummetmaelk 9y agoAirplanes don't flap their their wings, but they are also orders of magnitude less energy efficient than birds. If you want computational power on the scale of the brain, power consumption is a real concern.
- Houshalter 9y agoAre planes less energy efficient than birds? Sure they consume more energy, but they can lift many orders of magnitude more weight. To carry that much weight, that much distance, you would need an unfathomable number of birds. Flying for a very long time. The same with with brains. As far as I can tell, transistors are orders of magnitude more energy efficient than synapses. Synapses use tons of slow chemical reactions to send a signal. Transistors just send a few electrons near light speed.
- skummetmaelk 9y agoBirds are more efficient in terms of energy expended to move the same mass the same distance as a plane. Transistors are not more efficient than synapses. Neurons and transistors in subthreshold transport charge in the same way, through diffusion. Neurons just have a more efficient structure leading to less energy expenditure for an equivalent amount of information processing as the transistor. If you operate your transistor above threshold as done in all digital circuits, you are orders of magnitude less efficient.
- i_cant_speel 9y agoPlanes also travel 500-600 MPH while birds fly, maybe 30-50 MPH? I don't know what point you are trying to make with that comment. If it was more energy efficient for planes to flap their wings, they would be doing it right now.
- skummetmaelk 9y agoI think you are conflating utility for humans and cost efficiency with energy efficiency. There is no question that birds are more energy efficient than planes in terms of energy expended to move the same mass the same distance. However, humans would prefer to spend large amounts of energy by burning fuel to cross the Atlantic in 6 hours. It is much more COST efficient, but that is because energy is cheap.
- dragandj 9y ago
- hacker_9 9y agoBirds only have to carry themselves though, so it's an unfair comparison.
- dkural 9y agoExcept, airplanes kinda do flap their "wings" - each motor blade is a wing. The motors then turn those blades - i.e. flap the blade wings, for the same purpose - push air and generate lift. Airplanes also have an additional set of wings for gliding.