IBM Shows Off Brain-Inspired Microchips

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at IBM have created microchips inspired by the basic functioning of the human brain. They believe the chips could perform tasks that humans excel at but computers normally don't. So far they have been taught to recognize handwriting, play Pong, and guide a car around a track. The same researchers previously modeled this kind of neurologically inspired computing using supercomputer simulations, and claimed to have simulated the complexity of a cat's cortex — a claim that sparked a firestorm of controversy at the time. The new hardware is designed to run this same software much more efficiently."

Skynet...

[Anonymous Coward]

yep. It's coming.

Re:Cargo Cult of the Neuroscience World

[maxwell demon]

If the emulation is successful, one can do to it what you can't easily do with the real thing: Manipulate it in any conceivable way to examine its inner workings, save its state and do different tests on exactly the same "brain" without the effects of earlier experiments disturbing (e.g. if some stimulus is new to it, then it will be new to it even the 100th time), and basically do arbitrary experiments with it without PETA complaining.

Re:Somewhere...

[Anonymous Coward]

So right now there are 17 comments. Get this: you have to scroll past the first 12 to actually get to anything relevant to the story. The rest is just a bunch of Slashtards having their usual circlejerk over Skynet, sharks with lasers, etc. I am sad that I had only 3 mod points to use for -1 Redundant mods.

Right now 12 out of 17, or 70% of all comments are useless, irrelevant, SPAM. How many of you want to be hypocritical bastards about this and say "well THIS is OUR KIND of SPAM and that somehow makes it okay, even though it fucking KILLS the signal-to-noise for anyone wanting anything actually on-topic"?

I mean I get the occasional joke here and there. But most of you really aren't as funny as you seem to think you are. Not by a long shot. There are comical sites intended for this sort of thing. You can go there and get absolutely humiliated as you are booed off the virtual stage when you tell another repetitive, redundant meme that wasn't very funny or clever in the first place ("someone's working on AI - KNEE JERK - MENTION SKYNET! - HEE HEE SO FUNNY - not). Why not go do that and experience how humor-impaired you really are?