Postage-stamp size ‘neurosynaptic’ computer chip mimics the human brain

[Playinghardball]

Researchers Thursday unveiled a powerful new postage-stamp size chip delivering supercomputer performance using a process that mimics the human brain.

The so-called “neurosynaptic” chip is a breakthrough that opens a wide new range of computing possibilities from self-driving cars to artificial intelligence systems that can installed on a smartphone, the scientists say.

The researchers from IBM, Cornell Tech and collaborators from around the world said they took an entirely new approach in design compared with previous computer architecture, moving toward a system called “cognitive computing.”

“We have taken inspiration from the cerebral cortex to design this chip,” said IBM chief scientist for brain-inspired computing, Dharmendra Modha, referring to the command center of the brain.

He said existing computers trace their lineage back to machines from the 1940s which are essentially “sequential number-crunching calculators” that perform mathematical or “left brain” tasks but little else.

The new chip dubbed “TrueNorth” works to mimic the “right brain” functions of sensory processing — responding to sights, smells and information from the environment to “learn” to respond in different situations, Modha said.

It accomplishes this task by using a huge network of “neurons” and “synapses,” similar to how the human brain functions by using information gathered from the body’s sensory organs.

The researchers designed TrueNorth with one million programmable neurons and 256 million programmable synapses, on a chip with 4,096 cores and 5.4 billion transistors.

A key to the performance is the extremely low energy use on the new chip, which runs on the equivalent energy of a hearing-aid battery.

- Sensor becomes the computer -

More here:http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/08/postage-stamp-size-neurosynaptic-computer-chip-mimics-the-human-brain/

[hunter]

1. Having the machine is simply beginning.

The difficult and most intriguing part of the journey will be programming it to do useful tasks.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28688781

Efforts to emulate biological nervous systems with machines like this will probably reveal subtleties of thought and problem solving we never imagined.

Naturally evolved nervous systems are a crazy-quilt of highly optimized and conserved subsystems and a few very ugly kludges and plenty of cruft.

The human eye, for example, has several obvious evolutionary kludges in it's structure. If our eyes are the direct work of an omniscient creator then he must have been sniffing glue that day.

Chips like this might well end up as the highly optimized and conserved subsystems of an artificial intelligence, but for now that's highly speculative.

I'm guessing when the first artificial intelligence announces itself it won't have a lot in common with our naturally evolved intelligence.

[BillZBubb]

2. This is a significant event.

There has been a lot of research done using simulated neural networks (in software), but the number of "neurons" is very limited. Even so, they prove to be very useful in learning pattern recognition.

Having hardware "neurons" on this scale will open up some exciting areas of research.