"I like the idea of a meta-mechanism that learns to update an associative memory based on how surprising the data is."

Just pointing out that that idea was in some of Schmidhuber's earlier work.

> Schmidhuber (or in this case you, on his behalf!) effectively saying "I worked on that problem, years ago" is irrelevant.

Ok. People do read his work and get ideas from it even if this didn't necessarily. He had a lot of good stuff.

> but the question is how do you combine and realize these functionalities into an actual cognitive architecture?

I believe Schmidhuber gave one at the time?