Preface

There are many things humans find easy to do that computers are currently unable to do. Tasks such as visual pattern recognition, understanding spoken language, recognizing and manipulating objects by touch, and navigating in a complex world are easy for humans. Yet despite decades of research, we have few viable algorithms for achieving human-like performance on a computer.

In humans, these capabilities are largely performed by the neocortex. Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) is a technology modeled on how the neocortex performs these functions. HTM offers the promise of building machines that approach or exceed human level performance for many cognitive tasks.

This document describes HTM technology. Chapter 1 provides a broad overview of HTM, outlining the importance of hierarchical organization, sparse distributed representations, and learning time-based transitions. Chapter 2 describes the HTM cortical learning algorithms in detail. Chapters 3 and 4 provide pseudocode for the HTM learning algorithms divided in two parts called the spatial pooler and temporal pooler. After reading chapters 2 through 4, experienced software engineers should be able to reproduce and experiment with the algorithms. Hopefully, some readers will go further and extend our work.