[sown]

So some ML/AI researchers I know consider Numenta to be of a somewhat "outsider artist" effort. Their opinions of the research from Numenta is that of lower regard.

Now, you don't have to upvote me for this, but you don't have to downvote me, either, because I happen to know experts in ML/AI who disagree with Jeff Hawkins. Got that? Downvoting me doesn't change these other people's opinion. I'm just relating to you what I've been told by others more qualified and knowledgeable in an area than I am not an expert in. I have to say all this because people seem to give Numenta a very dogmatic approval and anyone who seems to question it on discussion boards gets flamed in a religious manner.

Edit: Hey, look, a downvote.

So, is Numenta genuinely really novel and new or is it snake oil? Or is it somewhere in between? Does it actually work better than what we have now?

[joe_the_user]

I'd love to read a substantial critique of Hawkins.

But I'm downvoting you for a post with nothing but hearsay, appeals to authority and arguing with your downvotes...

And no, I don't care what your important friends think of Hawkins. I'd care if they wrote something substantial I could read but otherwise, hey, get off my lawn...

[sown]

All I did was ask -- ASK -- whether if Numenta actually works.

So does it work? Better than what we have? Is it really novel?

ps: You're failing to make a prime distinction about argument from authority and falacious argument from authority. You can safely argue from authority by someone if is a genuine expert and a consensus of experts all are saying the same thing. An expert would be if most of what an authority says on a topic is often virtually all the time, then you could be OK with that person being an expert. The Southern Baptist can argue from authority about biblical interpretations given that they should know Greek/Hebrew/Latin, ancient mediterranean history, etc. They can't argue from authority about evolutionary biology if they don't know anything about it.

The reason I posted here is because I don't talk to my ML/AI friends often, I don't have many of them, and they haven't explained why they think what they do.

I don't understand why it is taking so much effort to get a simple amount of proof. Surely, there's a corpus of data with performance metrics that exists and can conclusively demonstrate one way or another?

[srconstantin]

I don't think "snake oil" is the right paradigm here. In ML/AI, lots of honest researchers are wrong; being a scientist who's wrong doesn't make you a criminal.

That said: Hawkins' principles are very different both from what the brain does, and from what the state of the art in machine learning does. My impression is that HTM's attempt to be too general and assume too little about the problem.

For vision in particular, most successful computer vision algorithms (as well as what we know about the visual cortex's mechanisms) make extensive use of information related to the fact that the image is an image. That is: edges are probably more likely to be continuous than broken; locally constant curvature is more likely than not; textures and colors usually continue over the surface of an object; objects occlude other objects; etc. Brains and effective computer vision algorithms hard-code a lot of information about the nature of the problem they're solving. Hawkins wants to bypass that, and I think it's probably too ambitious an aspiration.

Then again, if he makes it, more power to him.

I don't think we should be prejudiced against someone who comes from the tech industry and wrote a popular book. It's certainly not "snake oil" -- it seems to be a good-faith attempt to solve an important problem. I think the odds are against it working, but that's not a moral condemnation.

[smosher]

Hawkins' reasoning struck me as very misguided. I'm not an expert in the field and I'm not up to speed on what Numenta's current form is, but his concept of creating half an intelligence has always offended my sensibilities.

I wanted to say something useful here but I don't know enough about what Numenta's actually doing. I know much of what is not being done, and it basically amounts to willful ignorance in my opinion.

Edit: let me revise this, since I'm being voted down with prejudice anyway. Hawkins has stated very clearly that the only valuable part of the brain to ML/AI research is the neocortex. He's plainly wrong, it should be easy enough to understand this is the final touch on the evolution of our brains—the least important in a survival sense. More directly, without a motivating force there is no opportunity for an intelligent system.

My gut reaction is that the whole thing is a fraud, but I have up to now refrained from using such terms because I'd rather not argue from a position of ignorance (there are things I don't know about Numenta.) On the other hand, it's obvious this subject brings about the ignorant, so I'd like to take the opportunity to address these people: you are deluding yourselves, just because you want to believe something doesn't make it true. (That goes double for you Jeff.)

Have a nice day.

[joe_the_user]

I don't think Hawkins is necessarily saying the neocortex is the only part of the brain that's interesting to understand.

I think the main argument is that there is reason to think that there is a single "neo-cortical algorithm", that it is somewhat simple compared to the massive complexity of the brain as a whole and that if you can understand this algorithm, there will be massive payoffs.

That argument too might be misguided but it seem like a pretty focused idea for going from brain to artificial intelligence (a problem where one would expect that simplifying approaching would be quite necessary).

I'm more doubtful of his idea that the neocortex is primarily about prediction. I suspect that's only one aspect.

[EvilTerran]

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.

[rdtsc]

> ... people seem to give Numenta a very dogmatic approval and anyone who seems to question it on discussion boards gets flamed in a religious manner.

I wonder why that is? Is it that Numenta is doing good nerd-marketing. It appeals well to the technical crowd (not AI experts but to people who love technology / programming ). I think among that crowd (and I am one of them) there is the hope that maybe the AI revolution is finally here. This one approach will take us "over the edge" into some kind of singularity. Over the years there have always been what seemed to be very promising "revolutionary" approaches that always made it seem a machine passing the Turing Test is "just around the corner". Wanting to have this hope and wanting to dream is what keeps these kind of stories going.

I am no AI expert but just judging from what I know and if I had to make a guess I would say this is mostly marketing. It seems to me AI is not a field where an "outsider" comes, gives TED talk, writes a book and now we have a revolution. In a way, to me this smells like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science type situation. Maybe I am just jaded and skeptical and good thing I am not involved in any such research (I would have given up and nothing would have been discovered) so I am glad people are researching and keep working on the problem, I just don't think this is "it" yet.

[ScottBurson]

What you have to factor in here is that people who consider themselves experts will often take a dim view of something new they don't understand, particularly if the work was done outside the system they're part of.

(A quote comes to mind: "The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives." -- Admiral William Leahy to Harry Truman, concerning the atomic bomb.)

Numenta's technology is definitely novel. How well it will work remains to be seen, but I think it's a very interesting experiment.