Check out this paper...
http://www.numenta.com/Numenta_HTM_Concepts.pdf
I think it's a good article.
It seems to fairly fully reveal the scope and nature of their current
scientific activities, though it says nothing about their plans for
commercialization or other practical application.
What they have is
-- a hierarchical representation of
patterns-among-patterns-among-patterns, arranged as a tree (or
sometimes a directed acyclic graph)
-- a Bayes net type belief updating function helping to determine
which patterns are present in a given situation
-- a scheme for recognizing temporal patterns in data, used at each
node in the memory tree, based on a simple greedy learning algorithm
that conceptually resembles Hopfield net learning but is implemented
differently
This is very nice but please note what is not here, for example
-- any kind of cognitive architecture for integrating action,
perception and cognition toward the achievement of goals in an
environment
-- any way of pragmatically representing abstract knowledge rather
than relatively simple repetitive patterns in data streams
-- any way of learning complex coordinated procedures, plans, etc.
etc.
The theoretical presumption here is that once you've solve the problem
of recognizing moderately complex patterns in perceptual data streams,
then you're essentially done with the AGI problem and the rest is just
some wrappers placed around your perception code. I don't think
so.... I think they are building a nice perceptual pattern
recognition module, and waving their hands around arguing that it
actually is just an exemplar for an approach that can be more general.
I agree that **philosophically** their approach can be extended beyond
perception, in the sense that the combination of hierarchy,
probabilistic belief propagation, and pattern recognition is critical
to all aspects of intelligence. But the particular ways theyve
implemented these themes seems to me not to generalize hardly at all
beyond the domain of perceptual pattern recognition. (I note that
Novamente also embodies all these themes, but in a different way,
oriented more toward cognition than perception.)
-- Ben
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