Forgetting

Man is endowed with the art of forgetting. We often wonder at the memory capacity of human brain, how it can remember multitude of things and offer coherent responses to stimuli. But I think we don't have huge storage space inside our brain. We don't even remember what we did yesterday, not even what we did today morning. Brain smartly forgets most things while retaining the most important things. I remember crossing an irrigation canal when I was 6, I remember its depth, but not what my feet felt at the bottom of the canal or the color of the water. My brain had smartly forgotten the nitty gritty of each event while retaining essence intact for over 20 years.

These days while google can index the whole internet, my brain cannot even remember what I was doing yesterday. So, to build an intelligent machine, I think we have reached a stage we no longer need to build larger storage systems. What we need is the smart algorithm to only remember the essence of events, while ignoring the useless details.

A compact data structure to store the knowledge, and an algorithm to quickly derive actions and add knowledge to the internal pool, is all that stands between machines and humans. Brace yourself to compete with the machines very soon.