IBM unveils chips that mimic the human brain

[Omni]

This really got my interest... I bet I'm already dealing with this. As Philip J Corso said, IBM was given reverse engineered stuff to incorporate into the public markets(IIRC, my memory on that is a bit hazy). I wouldn't doubt lucrative contracts and deals with large corporations having to do with black project stuff, given and/or researched by companies like IBM.

This is significant AI news....



IBM has unveiled a new experimental computer chip that it says mimics the human brain in that it perceives, acts and even thinks.

It terms the machines built with these chips "cognitive computers", claiming that they are able to learn through experience, find patterns, generate ideas and understand the outcomes.

In building this new generation of chip, IBM combined principles of nanoscience, neuroscience and supercomputing.

It has been awarded $21m (£12.7m) of new funding by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the next phase of the project, which it terms "Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics" (SyNAPSE).

Read more: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2102735/ibm-unveils-chips-mimic-human-brain#ixzz1VwHBsSuD

[Ilie Pandia]

Thanks Omniverse for this find.

I have read the article and I am a bit puzzled. There is no mention of "how this works", no pictures of these chips, or some working model. Well they mimic the human brain they say :)

Quote from the article:



The scientists have built two working prototype designs. Both cores contain 256 neurons, one with 262,144 programmable synapses and the other with 65,536 learning synapses. The team has successfully demonstrated simple applications like navigation, machine vision, pattern recognition, associative memory and classification.


That is so very old stuff... I've learn about this in college a couple of years ago (5-6 years). We even had homework for the AI class to write neural networks that would do pattern recognition and associative memory and classification.

Project Natal form 2009 was doing a very good job already! It blew my mind at the time. So I don't understand what is the fuss with this new chip? Unless they've used some supper cool nano tech or something they don't mention


Another quote:


"A cognitive computing system monitoring the world's water supply could contain a network of sensors and actuators that constantly record and report metrics such as temperature, pressure, wave height, acoustics and ocean tide, and issue tsunami warnings based on its decision making," said IBM in a statement.


This reminds me a lot of Jaques Fresco and his Venus Project ideas. While interesting, you don't really need a cognitive system to read the temperature of a sensor and follow a decision three. A simple server with some cool programming can handle this very well. If there are servers that can handle the amount of data and traffic that Youtube handles, reading some sensors is not a big challenge.

So the mystery remains, why it this a big deal? And coming from IBM is also curious. In my readings here on Avalon, IBM and the not-so-public tech is mentioned quite a lot.


Ref:
Project Natal 2009 - Milo AI
CPIbGnBQcJY

PS: Here is the original press release from IBM (http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/35251.wss). Apparently the big fuss is about the technology, the small size and the fact that what was done before with software will now be done in a chip.