Jeff Hawkins - On Intelligence

If all research papers were published the way Jeff Hawkins published his On Intelligence, the world would be a different place to live. I strongly feel that this is the most important work in the field which is otherwise so bloated with wasted directionless efforts. This book is nothing like any research paper you might have read so far. It’s written in very personal way. Instead of just spitting out end product, thoughts and algorithms, author also tells you what other directions he was thinking about and what made him to go for this one. The book however is really low on technical “mojo”. Infect I just barely found it technical enough to keep me interested. The biggest missing gap is that author haven’t really formalized his ideas on strong mathematical foundation. Also at times you would feel as if content is just too overly sweetened and you can’t just let it push it through your throat (talk about pages and pages of “for example” for one simple concept!), but hang on. A guy from Stanford, Dileep Geaorge, has done some work in formalizing authors ideas and even made a working software prototype showing that it successfully produces solid vision recognition. There are still few missing links but I’ve hardly any doubts that this is the right direction.

Jeff Hawkins will be giving a lecture at NY Science Acadamy tomorrow (2/2/2005).

The stage is set.