My First Blog Post!

So I had this sudden ephiphany yesterday and posted it on a forum:

What we humans do differently from computers is that we're capable of imperfect memory.

You may think that this is a serious disadvantage, but it's actually an advantage.

IMHO, the power of the human brain lies with it's ability to create generalisations based on subjective observation. Why do we do it? Because memory is finite. So, in order to maximize the amount that we can remember, our minds are constantly trying to make rough "rules" (ie. algorithms) about the world around us. It's like those word associative tricks some people get really good at in order to remember the entire phone book... we all do that on a daily basis, except it might be for a recipe or a driving route.

When our minds aren't focused on something, our thoughts stray to supposedly random disjointed images. What we're really doing is a sort of disk-defrag - trying to find a more efficient means of storage. In order to facilitate this process, we must "alter" our perspective or reality in order to make most use of our generalisations.

Another good analogy is that of compression software. If something is repeated often, there's no point remembering the same thing over and over again - make a general rule and remember it once.

The next step in AI must be in giving computers the ability to make minor errors in saving data in order to save more data.

Thanks for listening to my ramble... (I had to write it down as I couldn't live with myself if I "generalised" out this idea...)