IBM making progress on creating brain-like computer

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) announced Wednesday it has made great progress on creating a brain-like computer system.

The company reported the research results at a supercomputing conference being held in Portland, Oregon, saying they have achieved a simulation with 1 billion neurons and 10 billion synapses using a supercomputer that has 147,456 processors.

Neurons are the key functional elements of the brain and synapses are the connections between them. The advancement represents the first near real-time simulation of the brain that exceeds the scale of a cat's cerebral cortex, a structure within the brain that plays a key role in memory, attention and thought.

The results suggest that building a cognitive computing chip is feasible, wrote researcher Dharmendra Modha, in a blog posting.

An emerging discipline, cognitive computing is about building the mind by understanding the brain. Cognitive computing attempts to engineer the mind by reverse engineering the brain, according to Modha. "We think that cognitive computing has the ability to profoundly transform the world and bring about entirely new computing architectures and, possibly even, industries," Modha noted.

The researchers predicted that with further progress in supercomputing, real-time human-scale cortical simulations are not only within reach, but indeed appear inevitable.

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