We’ve been hearing about Jeff Hawkins’ start-up Numenta, for a few years now. His book, On Intelligence, outlines his theory of how the mind works and developed the concept of Hierarchical Temporal Memory. Now Numenta has revealed Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing (NuPIC), which is a technical implementation of Hierarchical Temporal Memory, which I call their “Magic Brain Machine”.

NuPIC in its current form can solve pattern recognition problems. One example given by Jeff Hawkins in his interview with Palm Addict is that normal computers, unlike human brains, do not have the ability to recognize a cat if you show it a photo of a cat. NuPIC as I understand it is a “brain” that will learn and assimilate new knowledge with every new input. If you’re technically inclined, you can download the first release of NuPIC now. The software is very much on an experimental level but is capable of solving complex problems. NuPIC is currently available for Linux and Mac OS only.

Obviously it will be a while before we see something like NuPIC that runs on our Treos, but I’d be happy to be able to use a real “second brain”!

Filed under: Mobile World

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