IBM to develop 'thinking computers'
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 19 November 2009, 14:56 IST   |    16 Comments
Printer Print Email Email
IBM to develop 'thinking computers'
Bangalore: In their pursuit of computers that "think" like a living thing's brain, researchers from IBM say that they have simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory - 100,000 times as much as your computer has. The scientists had previously simulated 40 percent of a mouse's brain in 2006, a rat's full brain in 2007, and one percent of a human's cerebral cortex this year, using progressively bigger supercomputers. The latest feat, being presented at a supercomputing conference in Portland, Oregon, does not mean the computer thinks like a cat, or that it is the progenitor of a race of robo-cats. Dharmendra Modha, Manager of Cognitive Computing for IBM Research and Senior Author of the paper, called it a "truly unprecedented scale of simulation." The researchers created a program that told the supercomputer, which is in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to behave how a brain is believed to behave. The computer was shown images of corporate logos, including IBM's, and the scientists watched that different parts of the simulated brain worked together to figure out what the image was. Researchers at Stanford University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were also part of the project. The simulation, which runs 100 times slower than an actual cat's brain, is more about watching how thoughts are formed in the brain and how the roughly one billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses in a cat's brain work together. Modha said that the research could lead to computers that rely less on "structured" data, such that the input two plus two equals four, and can handle ambiguity better, like identifying the corporate logo even if the image is blurry. Or, such computers could incorporate senses like sight, touch and hearing into the decisions they make.

Digital Supply Chain Transformation – Winning the AI/ML Way