Michael Gaze (1927-2012) was a contemporary of Roger Sperry who went in search of the rules of brain wiring. Inspired by Sperry, Gaze tested the core ideas of the field using electrophysiology to map connectivity – and described just how relative positioning, as opposed to Sperry’s rigid code, can lead to synaptic specificity in the visual system. Never as famous…
Geoffrey Hinton is both a founding father and visionary critic of current approaches to AI. He has repeatedly been thoughtful about the lessons the field may learn from biology. He has also clearly spelled out fundamental limits to the currently most successful approaches of software-based learning methods that do not require prior information in the hardware. In his new preprint…
Babies are not born with randomly connected brains and turned on to learn. And yet, 100 years ago, neurobiologists were not so sure. In fact, most of them rather liked the idea, because they disliked the alternative: the development of intelligent brains without learning – as if embryo development could determine who you are. 100 years ago, neurobiologists had only…
The German newpaper Frankfurther Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) has published the article ‘Was der Künstlichen Intelligenz zum menschlichen Gehirn fehlt’ both in print and online (paywalled, unfortunately). It translates to ‘What AI is missing to become a human brain’. Similar English articles can be found here at The Self-Assembling Brain and at Princeton University Press.
You can describe a digital image by describing the coordinate and color of every individual pixel, meaning each of the smallest component ‘dots’ that together make up the picture. Since pictures taken with modern cell phones and cameras have an ever increasing resolution, this leads to rather large image files to save and send to friends. Fortunately, most images can…