U.S. technology firm IBM claims to have built two prototype chips that closely replicate how the human brain processes information. According to researchers, the new chips have parts that act like digital 'neurons' and 'synapses,' and can adapt to unexpected information that they weren't specifically programmed to handle. Computers powered by such chips could potentially process real-world data, such as temperature, sound, or motion.
IBM develops first 'brain chips' capable of mimicking the process of human thought
- The chips can adapt to information that they weren't specifically programmed to expect
- They can potentially process real-world signals such as temperature, sound or motion and make sense of them
The challenge in training a computer to behave like a human brain has tested the limits of science for decades.
But researchers from IBM today said they have made a key step towards combining the two worlds.
The U.S. technology firm has built two prototype chips that it says process data more like how humans digest information than the chips that currently power PCs and supercomputers.
Looking to the future: IBM has developed two prototype chips it claims comes closer than ever to replicating the human brain
The chips represent a significant milestone in a six-year-long project that has involved 100 researchers and some $41million (£25million) in funding from the U.S. government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). IBM has also committed an undisclosed amount of money.
The prototypes offer further evidence of the growing importance of 'parallel processing', or computers doing multiple tasks simultaneously.
That is important for rendering graphics and crunching large amounts of data.
The uses of the IBM chips so far are prosaic, such as steering a simulated car through a maze, or playing Pong.
It may be a decade or longer before the chips make their way out of the lab and into actual products.
But what is important is not what the chips are doing, but how they are doing it, says Giulio Tononi, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who worked with IBM on the project.
The chips' ability to adapt to types of information that it wasn't specifically programmed to expect is a key feature.
Professor Tononi said: 'There's a lot of work to do still, but the most important thing is usually the first step and this is not one step, it's a few steps.'
Technologists have long imagined computers that learn like humans. iPhone or Google servers can be programmed to predict certain behaviour based on past events.
But the techniques being explored by IBM and other companies and university research labs around 'cognitive computing' could lead to chips that are better able to adapt to unexpected information.
Such projects can be made more efficient with tools to monitor the myriad analogue signals present in those environments.
Dharmendra Modha, project leader for IBM Research, said the new chips have parts that behave like digital 'neurons' and 'synapses' that make them different than other chips.
Each 'core', or processing engine, has computing, communication and memory functions.
'The key, key, key difference really is the memory and the processor are very closely brought together. There's a massive, massive amount of parallelism.'
The project is part of the same research that led to IBM's announcement in 2009 that it had simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer.
Using progressively bigger supercomputers, IBM had previously simulated 40 per cent of a mouse's brain in 2006, a rat's full brain in 2007, and 1 per cent of a human's cerebral cortex in 2009.
'It really changes the perspective from "What if?" to "What now?"' he said.
'Today we proved it was possible. There have been many sceptics, and there will be more, but this completes in a certain sense our first round of innovation.'
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