The world’s second largest IT company, IBM, announced that it will soon make electronic circuits that will be as complex as a brain. As the part of “cognitive computing”, this research will need to include all the smartest people and will consists of  “neurobiologists, computer and materials scientists and psychologists”.

A replica as complex as a human brain is not practical with today’s technology, so the current objective is to “create a system with the level of complexity of a cat’s brain.” Obviously, at present there are no computers which can remotely approach something similar. The initial budget for this research is coming from the US based defense agency DARPA.

Dharmendra Modha, the IBM scientist who is heading the collaboration explains, “The key idea of cognitive computing is to engineer mind-like intelligent machines by reverse engineering the structure, dynamics, function and behavior of the brain.”

Scientists believe that the success of this research will be a breakthrough in computers making decisions, large scale data analysis and even complex image recognition.

[source: bbc.co.uk]