Efficient dendritic learning as an alternative to synaptic plasticity hypothesis

[Bitking]

It may mean that adding dendrite structure allows HTM to outperform DL systems?

Just as we usually don’t need to model the chemistry and size of a synapse - we have a single weight variable, we may not need to model the internal dendritic structure - only the effects it may have on related synapses on a single dendrite.

I have always thought that dendrite paths could be an important part of a biologically faithful system, and have anticipated that with this post:

Path based SDRs (Dendrite Trees)

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I have been trying to work out how to form the cortical.io retina using HTMs. This effort has led me to work through what operations are being performed by HTMs and how to compute with these primitives. The basic task of the conversion between a stream of data and a spatial distribution of the semantically related SDRs requires that the somewhere in the computations there is a sense of location in the cell bodies. I also wanted to work within the restrictio…

Note the mention of distance along the dendrite as a possible part of processing each dendrite structure.