Sparse Hierarchical Distributed Invariant Representations
Looking into Neural Code for better AIs
How does your brain represent the environment ? The partial answer is the admittedly complex title which we will explore in this article.
Representation is a hard problem for both Neuroscience and AI and a good explanation of these terms I think is helpful if we are to build better AIs, this is my attempt.
Representations
A representation is simply that, the internal description of something, a thing, an idea or even a thought or feeling in general, but alas these later ones are very high in the hierarchy of representations and we don’t yet know exactly how they are formed in biological brains. A simpler representation is your perception of a physical thing out there, an apple for instance.
And how do we know they are representations ? We don’t definitely know, what with everyone perceiving the environment in a slightly different way, but we have some agreement and if I ask you what this is:
