chetan51

I believe the basic building blocks (prediction, pattern recognition, attention, etc.) give rise to the higher-level phenomenon that you mentioned. I think we need to first understand those fundamental principles, and we'll be able to infer most of the rest from that point.

Emergent phenomenon can seem complicated and impossible to understand, but the mechanisms that give rise to them are usually simple (for example, evolution creating diverse and intricate life).

"Why would we continue to file patents on work that is going to be open source? The principle reason is to protect the NuPIC community. For example, outside developers could work on similar concepts without becoming part of the open source community. They could seek patents on their own work, making it proprietary and blocking progress of open source NuPIC developers. By keeping our patent portfolio current, we retain the ability to protect the NuPIC community from these threats. In other words, by holding patents on the work, we are able to protect the whole community from others who might seek to wall off their work through patents. In addition to filing select patents going forward, we also will evaluate other measures that would enhance patent protection for the NuPIC community."

Since this is a long-term project, it's more important that Numenta is able to protect the community it is building from patent trolls, and this is one approach to doing that.