About Thinking Solutions
The mission of Thinking Solutions is to provide tools to people to support their
learning of language and to people looking to utilise language on computer to improve
the human interaction.
By exploiting the potential of the pattern matching and linking paradigm, Thinking
Solutions provides new tools to the education, media, computer and medical markets.
Through partnerships with business, Thinking Solutions provides innovative solutions
to support the development of new products and services. In many respects, Thinking
Solutions is a kind of specialised research and development company focused on the
application of patomic theory.
In 1997, John Ball started the business called Thinking Solutions in Sydney, Australia
to develop patomic theory for the benefit of others. John is a cognitive scientist
whose objective is to create and educate others on the design of new pattern-matching
machines and while doing this, helping them to exploit the approach.
Thinking Solutions was incorporated on 28 November 2006.
Our website's mission
There is a lot of value in machines being able to understand written language. By
providing helpful software to students and teachers as a first step, we can continue
the development of software leading towards even more useful language tools. Our
goal is to facilitate the creation of machine intelligence over the next twenty
years.
This web site supports the journey to more intelligent machines by providing the
connection with the current tools we can provide and the connection to others working
in this field.
When you think about it, despite more than fifty years of dedicated research into
artificial intelligence, there are no intelligent, speaking robots on the planet.
We need fresh approaches and discussion. We want machine intelligence.
About John Ball
John Ball has always been interested in how a brain works.
He is dedicated to expanding our awareness in the underlying simplicity but apparent
complexity of the human brain. He devised a new model of the brain in 1983 and has
enhanced it in the ensuing years leading to its announcement in the early 2000s
on Australian radio.
The major challenge in developing a model of the brain lies in our perception of
the brain’s complexity and lightning fast performance. John’s model, while primarily
targeted at the creation of intelligent talking machines, also leads to greater
insights into human beings than was previously possible.
In 1986, John visited a number of Artificial Intelligence (AI) development sites
including MIT, Stanford and IBM's development lab at Yorktown to pursue this interest.
John maintained a high degree of secrecy about the idea in the early days to attempt
to protect its value although, in retrospect, there is little value in not helping
others to exploit it. John has continued with independent development.
John has worked for global computer and telecommunications companies since 1984
in a variety of technical and management roles.
In the 1980s, he worked as an Australian specialist for IBM, supporting mainframes
and complex systems environments in the region — on occasion assisting at Poughkeepsie,
IBM’s development laboratory in New York. He subsequently moved into major software
development and business reengineering projects, in one case successfully using
revolutionary business practices to complete work in a quarter of the time with
a quarter of the staff to deliver unprecedented outcomes. Most recently, John has
been consulting to a large Australian-based telecommunications company, managing
large outsourcing change programs.
John’s passion remains simple: learning how to create intelligent machines through
the greater understanding and emulation of biological brains.
He holds a degree in Science from the University of Sydney, specialising in computer
science, a Masters in Cognitive Science from the University of New South Wales and
an MBA from Macquarie University. All of these institutions are located in the 2000
Olympic Games city, “down under” in Sydney, Australia.