
The Thousand Brains Model of Intelligence - jcua
https://medium.com/@Numenta/the-thousand-brains-model-of-intelligence-f1a70a6adf9c
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bluetwo
HTM has been covered here a dozen different ways.

Still waiting for good examples of how the technology solves problems better
than other methods.

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gervase
If they had a solution that was better than what was out there, and they are
publishing their research, then it follows we should be able to find their
novelty in their publications, right? So, I took a look at their publication
track record on this topic [0], and there are a few red flags that stood out
to me.

First, they're publishing at a pretty astounding rate, with new submissions
roughly every 1-3 months for the past 3 years, with the same authors. I'm
skeptical that a small (<5?) research team would be able to produce novel
contributions at such a rate, which leads me to believe they're probably
remixing previous works into incremental publications.

Second, all of their publications are in neuroscience journals, which may not
be up to date with the latest research going on with HTM in (for example)
computer science. NIPS does have a computational neuroscience track, after all
- I would have expected at least some interdisciplinary leakage if the novelty
was very high.

Finally, the journals that they're publishing in are relatively low-ranking,
which also seems to indicate that what they're doing is not necessary very
novel (as you said, perhaps just a re-hash of existing HTM research).

Also, this article was co-written with a marketing exec, so I think it's fair
to bring a certain level of skepticism.

[0]:
[https://numenta.com/resources/papers/](https://numenta.com/resources/papers/)

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vanderZwan
Unless I misinterpret what you are saying, your arguments only explain why you
don't _expect_ to see novelty, but you haven't actually looked at the
publications and concluded that they don't contain any.

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MarkMMullin
Hmmm - I've always thought you could see the effect of the vertical stack
every time you were out for a walk and found yourself four feet in the air
with your brain going "My bad dude - stick, not a snake "\- I only read the
linked article, but on the surface, it seems like imputing magical properties
to the stack it doesn't need - if you just look at it as a mechanism for
allowing certain signals to move across the hierarchy because they are
extremely beneficial in bundling the wider range of information that's rising
up from the broader lower hierarchical layers. My 2c admittedly.

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carapace
> "...our brain is not building one model of the world. It’s building
> thousands of models in parallel!"

Isn't this discussed in Minsky's "Society of Mind"?

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tlarkworthy
This kinda sounds like each cortical column is doing SLAM in it's individual
sensor modality.

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shinski
as someone not familiar with the SLAM acronym, had to look it up
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_mapping)

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jmatthews
Turtles all the way down then?

