Brain On a Chip
Are we humans - with our carbon-based neural net "wetware" brains - at a point in history when we might be able to imprint the circuitry of the human brain using transistors on a silicon chip?
A well-covered recent article in MIT's Technology Review reports that a team of European scientists may have taken the first steps in creating a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain.
What's involved in this seemingly Herculean task? The brain is a parallel processor. The colorful blue jay I see flitting from tree to tree in my garden appears as a single image. But the brain divides what it sees into four components: color, motion, shape, and depth. These are individually processed - at the same time - and compared to my stored memories (blue things, things with feathers, things that fly, other blue jays that I've seen).
My brain then combines all of these processes into one image that I see and comprehend. And that's just vision aspect of a multiplexed moment of perception. At the same time, I smell the fragrant flowers in my garden, hear the neighbors talking about a party, feel my muscles relax as I sit in my lounge chair, and daydream about the beaches of Fiji while I answer my cell phone...
...The brain is also massively parallel, but currently on a different scale than the most powerful supercomputers. The human cortex has about 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses. A supercomputer capable of running a software simulation of the human brain doesn't yet exist. Researchers estimate that it would require at least a machine with a computational capacity of 36.8 petaflops (a petaflop is a thousand trillion floating point operations per second) and a memory capacity of 3.2 petabytes - a scale that supercomputer technology isn't expected to hit for at least three years.
Enter the team of scientists in Europe that 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 still orders of magnitude from a human brain. Yet, the chip "can mimic the brain's ability to learn more closely than any other machine's " thus far.
"The chip has a fraction of the number of neurons or connections found in a brain, but its design allows it to be scaled up." So says Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at Heidelberg University in Germany...
Source: h+ magazine
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