Scientists have produced a new computer chip that mimics the organisation of the brain, and squeezed in one million computational units called "neurons". http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28688781 They describe it as a supercomputer the size of a postage stamp. Each neuron on the chip connects to 256 others, and together they can pick out the key features in a visual scene in real time, using very little power. He told BBC News the processor was "a new machine for a new era". But it will take some time for the chip, dubbed TrueNorth, to be commercially useful. This is partly because programs need to be written from scratch to run on this type of chip, instead of on the traditional style which was conceived in the 1940s and still powers nearly all modern computers. Instead of binary ones and zeros, the units of computation here are spikes. When its inputs are active enough, one of TrueNorth's "neurons" generates a spike and sends it across the chip to other neurons, taking them closer to their own threshold. Software has to be written completely differently for these spiking-network systems. Dr Modha and his team managed to engineer an interconnected 64-by-64 grid of these cores on to a single chip, delivering over one million neurons in total. "This isn't a 10-15% improvement," he said. "You're talking about orders and orders of magnitude." Prof Steve Furber is a computer engineer at the University of Manchester who works on a similarly ambitious brain simulation project called SpiNNaker. That initiative uses a more flexible strategy, where the connections between neurons are not hard-wired. He told BBC News that "time will tell" which strategy succeeds in different applications. ******************************************* It really is amazing how far we have come, and just in my lifetime (I am in my 30's and was exposed to pretty close to the first home PC's). Whats amazing is this is just the beginning of finding new ways to process data and there is competition, even against this format that are real and being developed. I think people better start debating where some of these technologies take us in the future, the singularity in computing will happen, and as people get older time seems to lose its significance as in as we are you a year is a long time, alittle older and its 10 years, alittle older and its 25 years ect ect. Could be possible sooner than we think if we can look past a decade or two, probably faster if computing makes the gains to let the artificial intelligence/ robots do it themselves. If that happens the climbing time to the singularity and beyond could get infinitely shorter very quickly!
China Set to Release the World’s Fastest Computer... The Fastest Computer in the World 27 Jan.`17 - China's Exascale Computer would be the fastest computer in the world, with their own Sunway TaihuLight coming in at a distant second; With the massive advancement of this computer release, research capabilities would grow exponentially
Computers are now so fast that many physicists expect a computer to be the next Einstein. The deepest unanswered questions in physics might be answered by a computer randomly searching for relationships, rather than deriving them through discovery, hypotheses, and experimentation.
But theorising and independently formulating solutions external to any sort of programming is categorically different to chucking more and more processing power into supercomputers. Let's not get to ahead of ourselves here .
Deep thought ? Deep Thought was a supercomputer programmed to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. A way to back up the Human Brain ? Repair damage ? Virtual Imortality ?
