DailyDirt: Creating Virtual And Artificial Brains

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

We're a long way away from creating an artificial intelligence from scratch that can perform general tasks. But plenty of researchers are learning some interesting things about AI while they build massively parallel computers or grow microbrains from little clumps of cells. Here are just a few projects where some synthetic brains are being hand-built by people.

• One *million* [/Dr. Evil voice] ARM processor cores are being hooked together to create a parallel computer called SpiNNaker that will try to simulate the human brain. Given that the human brain has about 100 billion neurons with 1,000 trillion connections between them all, this project is less than 1% of the way towards a full brain simulation. [url]
• Growing a brain in a petri dish from rat neurons might be an interesting approach to building a brain de novo. So far, researchers have created a network of about 60 rat neurons which seem to be able to sustain activity for about 12 seconds. [url]
• Folks from IBM are working on cognitive computing like the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project with some DARPA funding to re-create a billion artificial neurons. Trying to beat the power efficiency of the human brain isn't an easy task. [url]
• To discover more interesting bot-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: artificial intelligence, brains, cognitive computing, microbrains, neurons, parallel computers, spinnaker, synapse
Companies: darpa, ibm