The brain's way of processing smells is inspiring scientists to rethink how we design machine learning algorithms. That all serves to make them great at playing chess or Go, at detecting if there’s a car in an image, at differentiating between depictions of cats and dogs.
Konrad Kording, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said:
But they are rather pathetic at composing music or writing short stories, they have great trouble reasoning meaningfully in the world.
To overcome those limitations, some research groups are turning back to the brain for fresh ideas.
Scientists trying to gain a better understanding of how organisms process chemical information have uncovered coding strategies that seem especially relevant to problems in AI.
