so your answer is nodes ?
Erm… not exactly… the neurons/ nodes are only part of the mechanism.
There are literally millions of ways to encode/ decode data in various systems.
Don’t get me started on data schemas… I could write volumes lol. So I’ll stick to a few basic examples.
Information is curious stuff… and a lot depends on how you perceive it.
You have all the stuff in your home kitchen required to build an object recogniser/ classifier at least on par if not better Google or Deepminds efforts. It will recognise any shape/ object from any orientation and utilises a kind of swam intelligence.
Have you figured it out?... a bucket of water and a measure. All objects displace a specific volume of water when submerged. A water molecule is a very simple ‘thing’, not intelligent in any way. All it wants to do is flow… both amongst its peers and the container/ object... but billions of water molecules together encode the complex properties of the shape into one single number… the displacement volume.
As a general rule I’ve found with data representation the more dimensions you can encode the data over the better. My simulations utilise hundreds of dimensions… that’s why parallel searches are so fast… your just searching the data from the perspective/ dimension of the search criteria.
So let’s say you have two objects that have exactly the same displacement… how to tell these apart? Add another dimension… weight. Now use using the mass of the molecules combined to produce just one number that represents this dimension of the complete object.
Using just these two dimensions it’s possible to build the recogniser… simple eh?
How many ways could you use the cars in a car park to encode data; you could encode various levels of data using the properties of the simulation. Car mass, colour, size, style, position, rotation, etc… imagine 80 billion cars and the data patterns you could store.
I know the examples where simple and it wasn’t my intention to patronise… It’s Xmas eve and I’m enjoying the Xmas spirit lol… so I’m… not running at full capacity lol.