IBM has designed a chip able to demonstrate specific skills of the human brain, very difficult to imitate by a conventional computer system.
Unlike a regular processor (CPU), the new creation of the IBM does not need specialized software to operate. Instead, the chip has the ability to learn from its experience, forming its own theories about what experience mean.
Framed in a whole new category of cognitive CPUs, the chip is able to interpret a complex data set more efficiently than a traditional PC processor. Connected to external sensors, it can respond to sensor stimuli to understand the environment around it, giving intuitive answers to problems which make it hard for an ordinary PC.
The first functional chips for this new class of CPUs were presented on Thursday, the product of a project called SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics). The two prototypes are a step towards creating computers with a sense of reason, that can provide answers to questions raised by appealing to their own experience and not predetermined software routines.
One of the prototype chips contains 262,144 programmable synapses and 65,536 synapses capable of learning. Compared with the more than 120 billion neurons that make up the human brain, interconnected by 1,000 trillion synapses, IBM created electronic brain is as rudimentary as possible, but it proves the viability of this technology.
Future plans for IBM include creating a chip with 1 million neurons and 10 billion synapses. Although the numbers seem huge, the entire chip could fit on a silicon piece of 1 square cm. Such a chip can perform complex tasks without too much difficulty and a tiny power consumption, operations that a traditional computer system could perform only appealing to sophisticated software routines compensating with raw power for the lack of efficiency.
One possible application could be to introduce a cognitive co-process in each tablet, smartphone or laptop, able to respond to external stimuli and even analyze user habits, customizing certain features of the device or to give smart answers to various problems.
The second phase of the SyNAPSE project was already funded with 21 million dollars, money offered by the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a research agency of the U.S. military.