Wondering about the history of HTM and SDR

No, I think that’s a fair way off how Numenta and HTM look at things. The ‘lowest processing structure’ is a column, which is visible anatomically and consists of a lot of neurons. There are no ‘weights’, but there are SDRs. Rather than worrying about cell behaviour, the driver for HTM is the idea of:

  1. Discover operating principles of neocortex
  2. Build systems based on these principles

The HTM model is an attempt to do that. There is no requirement that it match the physical architecture of the neocortex, as long is can follow the same operating principles.