Robert Hecht-Nielsen
Encyclopedia
Robert Hecht-Nielsen is an adjunct professor of electrical
and computer engineering
at the University of California, San Diego
. He co-founded HNC Software, and became a vice president of R&D at Fair Isaac Corporation when it acquired the company.
In March, 2005, he held an event to announce "the fundamental mechanism of cognition", which he believes is a process of confabulation (neural networks)
. He posits that all actions and thoughts begin as the "winners" of competitions, where confabulations are tested for cogency based on antecedent support. He presented some mathematical models of the proposed mechanism, and some experimental results where software using this system was able to add several words to a stub of a sentence, keeping that stub coherent and, optionally, maintaining some connection to a full input sentence supplied as context.
For example, given "But the other ..." the program returns "But the other semifinal match between fourth-seeded ...". Given "Japan manufactures many consumer products." for context, and the same three-word stub, it returns "But the other executives included well-known companies ...". Five pages of such examples were given.
He made red, green, and blue-striped medallions to commemorate the event, and had them distributed to the audience along with pamphlets explaining their significance: "This new era, which as yet has no name, will be characterized by the eternal universal freedom from want provided by intelligent machines."
Electrical engineering
Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...
and computer engineering
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
at the University of California, San Diego
University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego, commonly known as UCSD or UC San Diego, is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, United States...
. He co-founded HNC Software, and became a vice president of R&D at Fair Isaac Corporation when it acquired the company.
In March, 2005, he held an event to announce "the fundamental mechanism of cognition", which he believes is a process of confabulation (neural networks)
Confabulation (neural networks)
A confabulation, also known as a false, degraded, or corrupted memory, is a stable pattern of activation in a neural network or neural assembly that does not correspond to any previously learned patterns...
. He posits that all actions and thoughts begin as the "winners" of competitions, where confabulations are tested for cogency based on antecedent support. He presented some mathematical models of the proposed mechanism, and some experimental results where software using this system was able to add several words to a stub of a sentence, keeping that stub coherent and, optionally, maintaining some connection to a full input sentence supplied as context.
For example, given "But the other ..." the program returns "But the other semifinal match between fourth-seeded ...". Given "Japan manufactures many consumer products." for context, and the same three-word stub, it returns "But the other executives included well-known companies ...". Five pages of such examples were given.
He made red, green, and blue-striped medallions to commemorate the event, and had them distributed to the audience along with pamphlets explaining their significance: "This new era, which as yet has no name, will be characterized by the eternal universal freedom from want provided by intelligent machines."