How Neural Computing Can Still Be Unconventional After All These Years

Attempts to infer a technology from the computing style of the brain have often focused on general learning styles, such as Hebbian learning, supervised learning, and reinforcement learning. The present talk will place such studies in a broader context based on the diversity of structures in the mammalian brain – not only does the cerebral cortex have many regions with their own distinctive characteristics, but their architecture differs drastically from that of basal ganglia, cerebellum, hippocampus, etc. We will discuss all this within a comparative, evolutionary context. The talk will make the case for a brain-inspired computing architecture which complements the bottom-up design of diverse styles of adaptive subsystem with a top-level design which melds a variety of such subsystems to best match the capability of the integrated system to the demands of a specific range of physical or informational environments.

This talk will be a sequel to

Arbib, M.A., 2003

, Towards a neurally-inspired computer architecture,

Natural computing, 2

:1-46, but the exposition will be self-contained.