IBM Shows Off Brain-Inspired Microchips

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at IBM have created microchips inspired by the basic functioning of the human brain. They believe the chips could perform tasks that humans excel at but computers normally don't. So far they have been taught to recognize handwriting, play Pong, and guide a car around a track. The same researchers previously modeled this kind of neurologically inspired computing using supercomputer simulations, and claimed to have simulated the complexity of a cat's cortex — a claim that sparked a firestorm of controversy at the time. The new hardware is designed to run this same software much more efficiently."

Comments

Re:Cargo Cult of the Neuroscience World

[maxwell demon]

If the emulation is successful, one can do to it what you can't easily do with the real thing: Manipulate it in any conceivable way to examine its inner workings, save its state and do different tests on exactly the same "brain" without the effects of earlier experiments disturbing (e.g. if some stimulus is new to it, then it will be new to it even the 100th time), and basically do arbitrary experiments with it without PETA complaining.