Geoffrey Hinton

Yeah, I was in single digits.

I was in single digits.

A few things.

When I was at high school in the early 1960s or mid-1960s, I had a very smart friend who was a brilliant mathematician and used to read a lot.

And he came into school one day and talked to me about the idea that memories might be distributed over many brain cells instead of in individual brain cells.

So that was inspired by holograms.

Holograms were just coming out then.

Gabor was active.

And so the idea of distributed memory got me very interested.

And ever since then, I've been wondering how the brain stores memories and actually how it works.

Both, really.

But in the 1970s, when I became a graduate student, it was obvious that there was a new methodology that hadn't been used that much, which was if you have any theory of how the brain works, you can simulate it on a digital computer, unless it's some crazy theorem that says it's all quantum effects.

And let's not go there.

You can simulate it on a digital computer.

And so you can test out your theory.

And it turns out if you tested most of the theories that were around, they actually didn't work when you simulated them.

So I spent my life trying to figure out

how you change the strength of connections between neurons so as to learn complicated things in a way that actually works when you simulate it on a digital computer.

And I fail to understand how the brain works.

We've understood some things about it, but we don't know how a brain gets the information it needs to change connection strengths.