RoboCop and I, Robot may not be as far-fetched as you think, and IBM and five universities including Stanford are teaming up to prove it. But first, they plan to build a computer that mimics the complexity of a cat’s brain.

It’s called ‘cognitive computing,’ a field that combines neurobiologists, computer and materials scientists, and psychologists. In this project the scientists and IBM come together to try and combine what they know about biological systems and supercomputer simulations of neurons.

A “consciously thinking” computer is to be built with the same structure as a human brain, consisting of umpteen million virtual neurons connected to each other via simulated synapses. Dharmendra Modha, the IBM scientist who is heading the collaboration and who worked on the Blue Brain project (see Supercomputer’s Key to the Brain) says, the problem is that we don’t really have a precise definition of what consciousness actually is. The mind effortlessly creates categories of time, space and interrelationships between them from the information provided by a large number of sensors. 

(via DailyTech)

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