March 31, 2009

Smart Chips

A smart chip, indeed!
An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain's ability to learn more closely than any other machine.  Although the chip has a fraction of the number of neurons or connections found in a brain, its design allows it to be scaled up, says Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at Heidelberg University, in Germany, who has coordinated the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States project, or FACETS.  The hope is that recreating the structure of the brain in computer form may help to further our understanding   of how to develop massively parallel, powerful new computers, says Meier. 
Picture © Karlheinz Meier 
But well nigh impossible (yet) to make something that functions like a human brain, I think... but this is an interesting small step towards that sci-fi-ish goal!

No comments:

Not one more refugee death, by Emmy Pérez

And just like that, my #NPM2018 celebrations end with  a poem  today by Emmy Pérez. Not one more refugee death by Emmy Pérez A r...