On Intelligence
Jan 20th, 2006 by Phil Dawes
Just finished reading ‘On intelligence’ by Jeff Hawkins, which I really enjoyed.
Hawkins is the entrepreneur responsible for inventing the palmpilot and handsprung treo among other things, but his primary interest is brains and discovering how they work. To further this interest he has spent a load of his entrepenurial cash creating a neural science research institute and this book is the result of his research. Put simply it is an attempt at a general algorithm for how the neocortex (the ‘intelligent’ bit of the human brain) works.
I read this book after seeing Aaron Swartz enthusiastic post which raves about both Hawkins and the book. (the post includes a crude description of the basic algorithm, so I won’t duplicate that here).
[…] This is old news but I’ve only just noticed that Numenta have released their whitepaper about HTM (called Hierarchical Temporal Memory - Concepts, Theory, and Terminology). Numenta is the company that Jeff Hawkins formed with Dileep and others to create products around the ideas in his ‘On Intelligence‘ book. […]