IBM Takes a (Feline) Step Toward Thinking Machines

“A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they’ve 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.

If researchers can make computers operate more like a brain thinks — by reasoning and dealing with abstractions, among other things — they could unleash tremendous insights in such diverse fields as medicine and economics.

A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they’ve 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.

“A truly unprecedented scale of simulation.”

Dharmendra Modha, manager of cognitive computing for IBM Research and senior author of the paper, called it a “truly unprecedented scale of simulation.” Researchers at Stanford University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were also part of the project.

Modha says the research could lead to computers that rely less on “structured” data, such the input 2 plus 2 equals 4, 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.

“We’ve made tremendous advances in collecting data, but we don’t have a collective theory yet for how this complex organ called the brain produces things like Shakespeare’s sonnets and Mozart’s symphonies,” he said. “The holy grail for neuroscientists is to map activity from single nerve cells, which they know about, into how billions of nerve cells act in concert.”

Modha says a simulation of a human cortex could come within the next decade if Moore’s Law holds. That’s the rule of thumb that the number of transistors on a computer chip tends to double every two years.

Yet Olds cautioned that simulating the human brain is “such a complex problem that we may not be able to get to an answer, even with supercomputing.”

“There are no guarantees in this game because the sheer complexity of the problem really dwarfs anything we’ve tried to do,” he said.

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IBM takes a (feline) step toward thinking machines By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology Writer – Wed Nov 18, 2009 12:02AM EST