Hawkins Releases Numenta Code
Entrepreneur-turned-cognitive neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins is distributing a “research release” of their experimental code base implementing his idea of hierarchical temporal memory described in his book, “On Intelligence”. Hawkins drew inspiration for the model from his own reading about the structure and function of the human neocortex and believes that it represents the foundation for developing intelligent machines.
Jeff explains this surprising move to open source the code for the Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing (NuPIC) on the Numenta web site:
Why are we making NuPIC available now?
We have been contacted by dozens of researchers and scientists who are excited about HTM and by our work at Numenta. These people are anxious to work on HTM, are willing to be pioneers, and are willing to accept the uncertainty associated with a new technology. We are making our tools available so that these sophisticated developers can start building a community around HTM technology. NuPIC has been under development for 18 months, is pretty solid, and is well documented – including several examples to make it easy to get started – so we’re ready to open up to more developers, even while knowing that we do not yet have benchmarking data, and we cannot make guarantees about applicability to specific problems.
Here’s why Hawkins thinks that HTMs are new.
We have been covering Hawkins’ work for a while now. See these previous posts for more background info.
Neurodudes is actively soliciting code reviews of the newly released software. Is NuPIC the next big thing, or are you left feeling cold? Post your thoughts yourself using the instructions on the right-hand column, or let us know at contactus -AT- neurodudes.com!
March 6th, 2007 at 5:30 am
Heh…. I read the title and though the Stephen Hawking wrote a book on the brain… I would read that one.
March 7th, 2007 at 11:18 am
What is the most complex or interesting thing that has been done with NuPIC yet?
March 7th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Apparently not much yet. Here are the implemented examples that I could find in the Programmer’s Guide. The release is really preliminary, which is one of the reasons it is surprising. Numenta is really enlisting folks to try and come up with complex or interesting applications…and its an open question as to whether this will succeed.