How the Brain might use Division

Abstract

One of the most fundamental questions in Biology or Artificial Intelligence is how the human brainperforms mathematical functions. How does a neural architecture that may organise itself mostly throughstatistics, know what to do? One possibility is to extract the problem to something more abstract. This becomesclear when thinking about how the brain handles large numbers, for example to the power of something, whensimply summing to an answer is not feasible. In this paper, the author suggests that the maths question can beanswered more easily if the problem is changed into one of symbol manipulation and not just number counting.If symbols can be compared and manipulated, maybe without understanding completely what they are, then themathematical operations become relative and some of them might even be rote learned. The proposed systemmay also be suggested as an alternative to the traditional computer binary system. Any of the actual maths stillbreaks down into binary operations, while a more symbolic level above that can manipulate the numbers andreduce the problem size, thus making the binary operations simpler. An interesting result of looking at this is thepossibility of a new fractal equation resulting from division, that can be used as a measure of good fit and wouldhelp the brain decide how to solve something through self-replacement and a comparison with this good fit.