IBM Devises Software For Its Experimental Brain-Modeling Chips

alphadogg writes "Following up on work commissioned by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), IBM has developed a programming paradigm, and associated simulator and basic software library, for its experimental SyNAPSE processor. The work suggests the processors could be used for extremely low-power yet computationally powerful sensor systems. 'Our end goal is to create a brain in a box,' said Dharmendra Modha, and IBM Research senior manager who is the principal investigator for the project. The work is a continuation of a DARPA project to design a system that replicates the way a human processes information." Also at SlashBI.

Comments

The goal is to create "a brain in a box."

[sehlat]

They've already done that. They call the boxes cubicles.

Re:Synapses Don't Empower Memory

[Immerman]

Actually, IIRC one of the best guesses as to how the brain stores information is in the pattern and weighting of synapses - neuron A gets energized by some combination of firings of the thousands of incoming synapses, plus its own internal memory/processing, and it fires as appropriate. AFAIK the details are one of those things that keeps getting more complicated the closer we look.