February 9, 2009

Cognitive Computing Project Aims to Reverse-Engineer the Mind

From Priya Ganapati's recent Wired Blog Network post:
In what could be one of the most ambitious computing projects ever, neuroscientists, computer engineers and psychologists are coming together in a bid to create an entirely new computing architecture that can simulate the brain's abilities for perception, interaction and cognition. All that, while being small enough to fit into a lunch box and consuming extremely small amounts of power.
As you might have guessed from the title, the team of neuroscientists et. al are going to come up with this architecture by "reverse-engineering" the brain.

Whoa. Like, remember when I was ranting about The Singularity?

I think it's time to start thinking about what kind of robot body you'd like.

I'm going for the Adrienne Barbeau-bot.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Nah. The brain and the computer have their similarities, but they are fundamentally different in nature. For starters, the brain is capable of organically modifying not just its software but also its hardware - technology is no where near doing that, and I honestly doubt it'll happen without a true organic component. Neural plasticity allows physical changes in data processing, not just software tweaking of algorithms. Though I do think traditional computer hardware can leap forward by processing more like the brain - but it'll still be static at the hardware level, and that's a big difference.