IBM alongside with four universities (Cornell, Columbia, Merced, Madison) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have created, and will unveil today, an experimental chip that is based in human brain’s architecture.
IBM’s so-called cognitive computing chips could one day simulate and emulate the brain’s ability to sense, perceive, interact and recognize — all tasks that humans can currently do much better than computers can.
“This is the seed for a new generation of computers, using a combination of supercomputing, neuroscience, and nanotechnology,” Modha (principal investigator of the DARPA project, called Synapse) said in an interview with VentureBeat. ”The computers we have today are more like calculators. We want to make something like the brain. It is a sharp departure from the past.”
This semiconductor is modeled completely different from the Von Neumann architecture , where memory and processor are linked via bus - a bottleneck (Von Neumann bottleneck) on the amount of data transfered, in numerous ways. It is based on tracking relationships between events and in a sense have it’s own cognition: learn and improve through experience, use feedback loops to learn from the outcome, generalize and create hypotheses.
“The goal is not to replace today’s computers. It’s to really take the road less traveled and build new generation of computers with a totally new approach to problems in business and science and government,” Modha says. “If today’s computers are left brained, rational and sequential then cognitive computing is intuitive and right-brained and slow, but the two together can become the future of our civilization’s computing stack.”