Background: Jeff Hawkins

• Wikipedia Bio
• Palm, Inc.
• Handspring
• Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience

Chapter 1: Artificial Intelligence

• Francis Crick, Thinking About the Brain, 1979 Scientific American
• A computer is programmed, has a CPU, must be perfect to work.
• A brains learns, has no centralized control, is fault tolerant, generalizes, is flexible.
• What is intelligence? The book claims that intelligence is something that takes place in the head; it is not a behavior.
• What does it mean to understand? The book claims that understanding cannot be measured by external behavior; it is instead an internal metric of how the brain remembers things and uses memories to make predictions.

Notable AI Events

• The Turing Test is a behavioral test.
• ELIZA
• Blocks World
• Artificial neurons can be shown to implement digital logic.
• Expert systems
• Deep Blue
• John Searle's Chinese Room argument

Chapter 2: Neural Networks

• Wikipedia article
• NETtalk
• AI neural networks focus on behavior.
• Hawkins believes that neural networks should account for time, feedback and physical brain structure (repeating hierarchies).
• Autoassociative networks can recreate memories from partial inputs and can store temporal patterns via time-delay feedback.

Understanding the Brain

• Hawkins believes that the conceptual framework necessary to understand the brain will be simple.
• Functionalism: intelligence is a property of organization. It does not matter out of what the brain is organized.