Citing competing teams on both sides of the Atlantic, this article describes “the race to develop cognitive computing by reverse engineering the brain.”
While IBM is using the world’s fourth-fastest supercomputer, the same supercomputer is also being used by the Blue Brain project at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. (The head of the project notes the difficulty in “recreating the three-dimensional structure of the brain in a 2-D piece of silicon… It’s not a brain. It’s more of a computer processor that has some of the accelerated parallel computing that the brain has.”)
Meanwhile IBM still hopes “to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging.”
With rapidly accelerating advances in supercomputer architectures, can a simulated human brain be far off?
