Brains versus computers

Associate Professor Andrew Paplinski is an Australian computer scientist who specialises in neural networks at Monash University in Melbourne.

He says the process described in Hopfield's paper helps us to remember a name from a fragment or recognise a partially obscured face.

He says applying Hopfield's model could lead to more accurate facial recognition computer technology.

Being able to mimic associative memory would give computers "extreme robustness of pattern recognition", Paplinski says.

For example, for a computer to recognise a partially visible face it would first have to recognise that the face is obscured, then that it is a face, and then it would have to find a match.

"To answer all these questions takes an enormous amount of computation," he says.

He says we can do this in a fraction of a second in a slow computer like our brain. So there were would be significant implications if we can figure out how this is done and design computers that can replicate it.