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Ask HN: What data structure does our brain use?

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Re: Ask HN: What data structure does our brain use?

#61

Post by jamalkumar »

tzs wrote: post #26
nicholas22 wrote: post #3

There are multiple. I suppose long-term memory is a hashtable and working memory is a stack ;)

I think long term memory is more organized than a hash table. I base this on observation of my own brain during a bad LSD trip, where I seemed to be aware of how I was reaching decisions. For example, if I looked at a door and wanted to remember what that door was for, I could "see" a vast 2 or 3 dimensional array of hundreds of doors that I had seen before, arranged so that similar doors were near each other, and th…

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_morphic03a... << ctrl+f 'she went to siggraph', there's a lot to this sort of thing which is super interesting

Re: Ask HN: What data structure does our brain use?

#62

Post by tejask »

nicholas22 wrote: post #3

There are multiple. I suppose long-term memory is a hashtable and working memory is a stack ;)

If you look at it this way, then you would need to have a timeout element associated with each entry. In neuroscience, long term memories are formed by neural genesis in hippocampal region - meaning new synapses form upon reinforcement learning. These connections decay over time, which means you slowly start "forgetting" things. If the timout is a small value and there is no stimulus to increase it, we will quickly forget leading to short term memory.

Re: Ask HN: What data structure does our brain use?

#63

Post by Cushman »

gmt2027 wrote: post #38
Cushman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you account for the fundamentally non-deterministic nature of the universe?

Actually representing the entire state of the universe sounds rather ambitious. However, the very action of 'imaging' will force the entire system into a consistent state by quantum collapse. The universe will be represented but changed, the original multitude of super-imposed states will be lost. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle implies that some things are just unknowable . However, only the most basic constituen…

But Newtonian mechanics doesn't apply 100% of the time, right? It applies most of the time, from your perspective, because most of the sizes, distances and speeds you deal with are very large, short, and slow compared to their relevant universal constants. But there's a very long tail of very small, far, fast things that do concern you, and there, rarely, your "100%" approximation falls down.

You say that the "macroscopic" universe is fairly deterministic, meaning things that are about the same size as your brain. But is that an observation about the universe, or about your brain?

Re: Ask HN: What data structure does our brain use?

#64

Post by akg0 »

Cushman wrote: post #63
gmt2027 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually representing the entire state of the universe sounds rather ambitious. However, the very action of 'imaging' will force the entire system into a consistent state by quantum collapse. The universe will be represented but changed, the original multitude of super-imposed states will be lost. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle implies that some things are just unknowable . However, only the most basic constituen…

But Newtonian mechanics doesn't apply 100% of the time, right? It applies most of the time, from your perspective, because most of the sizes, distances and speeds you deal with are very large, short, and slow compared to their relevant universal constants. But there's a very long tail of very small, far, fast things that do concern you, and there, rarely, your "100%" approximation falls down. You say that the "macros…

It's an observation about the universe. Yes, things about the size of his brain appear to to have deterministic behavior, but so do mountains, oceans, moons, planets and stars - which are, needless to say, nowhere near the size of his brain.

The appearance of "randomness" at very small scales can be explained as non-determinism, or as a deterministic effect of some property that we haven't yet detected.

The point being that the universe has not been shown to have a "fundamentally non-deterministic nature".

Re: Ask HN: What data structure does our brain use?

#65

Post by akg0 »

jQueryIsAwesome wrote: post #58
akg0 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, non-determinism would have to be demonstrated.

The problem is, all the things we don't understand could be labed as non-determined (i.e: quantum particles moving "randomly")

I don't see how. "Not predictable given what I've observed so far" is a long way from "not predictable".

Re: Ask HN: What data structure does our brain use?

#67

Post by ixinetwork »

Aarvay wrote: post #7
nicholas22 wrote: post #3

There are multiple. I suppose long-term memory is a hashtable and working memory is a stack ;)

Yes. Agreed. But it'll be better to think on a different line. Say, you take a situation and analyze how the brain manipulates.

http://www.ixinetwork.com/

Re: Ask HN: What data structure does our brain use?

#68

Post by beej71 »

On Monday, it starts a low-speed read of a big array off magtape. Tuesday through Thursday, it continues to read the array. On Friday, a random number is chosen, and the activity stored in that array element is performed Friday night, possibly setting the REGRET flag. Saturday is spent shuffling the array, while on Sunday, a high-speed write of the data is performed back to tape. At 12AM Monday, the brain executes a GOTO 10 instruction, and the process repeats.

Re: Ask HN: What data structure does our brain use?

#69

Post by ixinetwork »

Aarvay wrote: post #7
nicholas22 wrote: post #3

There are multiple. I suppose long-term memory is a hashtable and working memory is a stack ;)

Yes. Agreed. But it'll be better to think on a different line. Say, you take a situation and analyze how the brain manipulates.

http://www.ixinetwork.com/ ixinetwork.com is a technology blog for latest trends and Information about Gadgets, Software, reviews and everything else that matter of life.

Re: Ask HN: What data structure does our brain use?

#70

Post by shasta »

Dn_Ab wrote: post #46
shasta wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a graph is a relation, and a relation is a function, etc. Just because you can model everything with graphs doesn't make them special. You can model everything with lots of things.

A correction. A relation is not a function but a function is a relation. A function is a restriction of a relation such that for each thing_a in A and thing_b in B, for a pairing of (thing_a's,thing_b's) by some relation f,each thing_a can only be paired with one thing_b in B.

A relation between X and Y is a function X -> Y -> Bool.
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