DeepMind's differentiable neural computer helps you navigate the subway with its memory

In his best-selling 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman hypothesized that thinking could be broken down into two distinct processes -- aptly named fast and slow thought. The former is all about your gut, the initial automatic responses you have to things, while the later is calculated, reflective and time-consuming. A new algorithm from DeepMind is beginning to show us that so-called "slow" thinking may soon be within the reach of machine learning. In a new paper published in Nature, the Google subsidiary DeepMind explained a new approach to machine learning that uses something called a differentiable neural computer. Neural networks operate using what essentially amounts to a very sophisticated trial and error process, eventually arriving at an answer.