Non-fiction 06 Jan 2006 03:44 pm
On Intelligence
On Intelligence
Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee
In this book, Jeff Hawkins, one of the founders of Palm and, later, Handspring, presents his ideas about how our brain works and how this knowledge can change the way we create intelligent computers.
The main focus of the book is that all ideas we have about how to implement artificial intelligence in computers are wrong. We are trying to replicate intelligent behaviour, but this can’t really be done with the computer architectures of today: we should be trying, instead, to replicate architecture.
According to him, the way the cerebral neocortex (the area mainly responsible for intelligent behaviour) works is, basically, by memory: the brain does not compute responses, it remembers them. What we have, then, is not a gigantic, massively parallel CPU: instead, we have an hierarchical associative memory system that remembers invariant representations of the world. An associative memory allows the brain to remember the whole of an object (or situation, or sound etc.) when confronted with just a part of it, and invariant representations allow it to recognize a face in any orientation or light conditions, a song in any key and so on. The hierarchy is important to filter information and to allow for “automatic” learned behaviours, among other things.
Hawkins tries to show how the brain architecture might work to generate this; almost everything is theoretical, but he does make predictions about observations that should prove or disprove (in part or in the whole) what he proposes.
The theory is very interesting, and it does make sense. It seems to match the way the brain seems to work, even though many details are missing (some because they are not known, some because this is not supposed to be a densely technical book). If correct, this may indeed bring (within a few decades) machines with behaviour that can truly be considered intelligent, even if for small domains; something that the current AI is very far from delivering. Jeff Hawkins is someone to keep an eye on.
