The human brain is a very complex and powerful organ that is unimaginably impressive in all the processes that it performs.
So far, no computer created by mankind has even come close. The key to the brain's capability is the efficiency of the neurons to serve as both a processor and memory device, in contrast to the physically separated units in modern computers.
There have been many attempts to make computers more brain-like. To date, our best effort to mimic the activity of the brain in an artificial system barely scratched the surface. In 2013, Riken's K Computer tried to simulate the biological functions of the brain. Using 82,944 processors and a petabyte of main memory, the researchers took 40 minutes to simulate one second of brain activity. This involves 1.73 billion neurons connected by 10.4 trillion synapses, around just ont to two percent of the brain.
Over the recent years, scientists and engineers have been trying to design hardware and algorithms that mimic the structure and function of the brain. Known as neuromorphic computing, this process is energy-intensive, in addition to the fact that training artificial neural networks is time-consuming.
In the quest to create artificial minds, experts try to create cyborg computers where the capabilities of the human brain are blended with the power of electronics.
In a recent breakthrough, researchers have created a hybrid computer using human brain tissue grown in the laboratory. This invention joins the growing field of biological computing with the potential to advance neuroscience research models of the brain.
Led by engineer Feng Guo of Indiana University Bloomington, the team integrated real, actual, human brain tissue with electronics to produce the Brainoware system. It is slightly less accurate than a pure hardware computer that runs on artificial intelligence, but it demonstrates a significant step in computer architecture.
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