IBM: Digital Rat Brain

August 19th, 2015

Via: Quartz:

In August 2014, IBM announced that it had built a “brain-inspired” computer chip—essentially a computer that was wired like an organic brain, rather than a traditional computer. These chips are designed to work like neurons—the brain’s nerve cells. Wired reported on Aug. 17 that the team working on the brain chips recently hit a new milestone—a system has about 48 million digital neurons, which is roughly as many as found in the brain of a rodent.

Dharmendra Modha, the lead researcher on the project, recently told Quartz that he sees the future of computing being composed of two types of computers—traditional, logical computers, and synaptic brain computers—working together in a sort of left brain-right brain symbiosis to create systems that were previously unimaginable. “Existing computers as really fast calculators,” Modha said.

While current chips are excellent at analyzing information in sequential order, the new “neuromorphic” types of chips Modha’s team are working on are better suited to finding patterns in information—like the right side of the brain. The chips’s design, with digital neurons communicating over digital versions of synapses, result in more powerful chips that need less power to run. Traditional chips follow instructions, whereas IBM’s new chip manages “spikes”—rather like spikes in electrical activity in an organic brain. The spikes are like a single bit of information, passing between neurons. “Together, this creates this truly path-breaking architecture that can process sensory data in real time while consuming minimal energy in a mobile phone factor,” Modha said.

IBM held a bootcamp to explain to government agencies, researchers, and universities how its chips work, and how to build apps using them. As the chips aren’t wired like traditional computer chips, they needed their own programming language, which the team designed, and is now showing to the world. For these chips, “the old mindset would be a square peg round hole,” Modha said.

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