IBM RESEARCHERS DEVELOP "THINKING COMPUTERS" FROM FELINE CEREBERAL CORTEX

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.

Scientists say they've made a breakthrough in their pursuit of computers that "think" like a living thing's brain ? An effort that tests the limits of technology.

Even the world's most powerful supercomputers can't replicate basic aspects of the human mind. The machines can't imagine a wall painted a different color, for instance, or picture a person's face and connect that to an emotion.

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.