Thanks for the links. I'm a huge fan of Stephen Pinker.

Most deep learning people I talk to acknowledge the algorithms & data structures are only lightly inspired by brain anatomy. Michael Jordan makes this point well in this IEEE article: http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/ma...

Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins and the team at Numenta are doing the most explicit biomimicry work I'm aware of. What else is happening that you know of?

There's a ton. Jeff and his team are on a very particular course and have been since 2004. There are some other things happening in the space and it has to do with collection of data and sensory inputs similar to 5 year old child. Send me an email at kasian.franks@gmail.com to continue as I don't check back on these comments too often.

Stephen Pinker gave a somewhat unbiased analysis of CTM (Computational Theory of the Mind) a while ago. Very relevant.

More direct link to Split-brain as it applies to computing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain_(computing)

Also, thanks for that term! Was not aware of it, but very useful to describe what I think is one of the big problems.

Yes, split brain approaches in general computing are very interesting and I think, over lap some approaches in ai-based computational combined with neuroscientific efforts.

"Biomimicry has always been the way forward in every industry"

Care to elaborate? Certainly classical computers don't look a whole lot like the information processing of any living being (I guess one could argue that they mimic what humans do with pencil and paper, but it seems a bit of a stretch.) To me other things like say human-made engines also don't look that similar to any life form, but then I think I know very little outside computing, relatively to say the average person here, and hence I'm genuinely curios about your remark and "wouldn't be surprised to hear something surprising."

Non-linear DNA computing. In addition, getting systems to compute based on words - see: https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp-tutorial/forums/t/1234...

e.g. Austria - Capital = Vienna OR 12 x 12 = 144

We continue to mimic nature in our scientific endeavors and the brain, as the best pattern matcher we know of, is no exception.

Exactly. When anybody dares to tell me this is an unsolvable problem, I tell them that nature has already solved it. :) We just need to figure out what nature is doing and how to reproduce that with digital, analog, or biomechanical machinery (which is of course, no small task).