This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
I'm curious what peoples opinions are of Jeff Hawkins' book 'on intelligence', and specifically the idea that 'intelligence is about prediction'. I'm about halfway through and I'm not convinced, so I was wondering if anybody could point me to further proofs of this or something, cheers
With regards to further reading, you can look at Hawkins' most recent (that I'm aware of) paper, "Towards a Mathematical Theory of Cortical Micro-Circuits". It's fairly technical, however, so I hope your math/neuroscience background is strong (I'm not knowledgeable enough to get much out of it).
You can also take a look at Hawkins' company Numenta, particularly the Technology Overview. Hierarchical Temporal Memory is the name of Hawkins' model of the neocortex, which IIRC he believes is responsible for some of the core prediction mechanisms in th... (read more)
Intelligence-as-prediction/compression is a pretty familiar idea to LWers; there are a number of posts on them which you can find by searching, or you can try looking into the bibliographies and links in:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Hutter
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutter_Prize
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Schmidhuber
(I have no comments anent On Intelligence specifically. I remember it as being pretty vague as to specifics, and not very dense at all - unobjectionable.)
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
July Part 1