Correct me if I'm dead wrong here, but isn't "software machine learning" taking advantage from all the neurons being "interconnected", similar to a brain? How does that work with physical (discrete?) components as in this case?
There's good reason to believe that different parts of the brain are quasi-specialized to particular applications. In a sense, this applies to particular software artificial neural networks (ANN) as well, particularly if the various hyper-parameters are fixed (number of neural units per layer, etc). One of the primary advantages of software ANNs over hardware ANNs (which don't really exist yet) would be the ability t…
The possibility space between relatively simple and insufficiently general unsupervise/clustering approaches and rigid SGD schemes is large, and probably contains the brain's true inference engine. Personally, I am excited by some of the ideas brought forward in this Bengio paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.05179.pdf