alt Hacker NewsThey state replacing backprop is not their goal.
Their goal is to understand how distributed systems which cannot do backprop (the brain) can still do learning.
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Personally I think the dirty secret of the brain is that a lot of things are hard coded. And many things that we need to learn are also hard coded except that some parameters need to be tuned.
If we puke, the brain will not do general aversive learning, it will learn to avoid specifically the last thing eaten, because it instinctively knows about food poisoning.
Imprinting is absolutely fascinating. Some newborn animals will run a very simple pattern detector like looking for a red dot or something and use that to bootstrap their conception of their parent.
For fully general learning I have a hunch that it can be done using local history plus a semi-global reward scalar (global neurotransmittor levels).
"Backprop alternative" was the OP's headline.
I think my initial assessment is correct: interesting research, but not an alternative, at least not yet.