On Intelligence
Among the great books I read last year, On Intelligence from Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee was one of the best. Jeff Hawkins was the founder of Palm Computing and Handspring, but later started the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience to work on his lifelong passion for the mysteries of the brain, and among them how the neocortex performs complex pattern matching analysis in order to support most human activities. The writing is simple enough for non-scientists to get most out of the book, while anyone even remotely familiar with Artificial Intelligence will find there a lot of food for thoughts. What I found particularly interesting with Jeff’s approach is that it reminded me of Stephen Worlfram’s attempt at reducing the world to a set of primitive algorithms with his principle of computational equivalence exposed in A New Kind of Science. There seems to be a common theme here, and I will try to find other authors who share the same approach. Many thanks to Tom for giving me a copy of this book.
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