Simulating the brain with traditional chips would require impractical megawatts of power. One scientist has an alternative.
According to Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist at Stanford University, a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate. That’s the amount of energy produced by a small hydroelectric plant. But a small group of computer scientists may have hit on a new neural supercomputer that could someday emulate the human brain’s low energy requirements of just 20 watts–barely enough to run a dim light bulb.
Discover Magazine has the story on how the Neurogrid computer could completely overhaul the traditional approach to computers. It trades the extreme precision of digital transistors for the brain’s chaos of many neurons firing, with misfires 30 percent to 90 percent of the time. Yet the brain works with this messy system by relying on crowds of neurons to shout over the noise of misfires and competing signals.
That willingness to give up precision for chaos could lead to a new era of creative computing that simulates the unpredictable patterns of brain activity. It could also represent a far more energy-efficient era — the Neurogrid fits in a briefcase and runs on what amounts to a few D batteries, or less than a watt.
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jeeeeeeee Wizzzzzzzzz!
Technology is the future.
Don’t we only use a small part of our brain, we have something called a ’super conscious’ which is basically what Derren makes use of (to my understanding) in the roulette predicting etc, which is a higher brain frequency.
Hmm… So that’s why I couldn’t kick-start my brain by shoving my fingers in a socket every morning. Overload. I’ll stick with coffee then.
I think we all know how forgetful and how clumsy us humans are with our big old neural net brains… Would computers that run on Nural Nets forget things or get things wrong and make mistakes?
Maybe my laptop won’t burn the leg off me anymore then!
Hm, but computers do create chaos … and fixes have to be thought up quite often …
I myself would not compare comuters with a brain .. a brain needs to see to so much more functions than most computers .. the chaos may not be chaos .. but may be there for a good reason. E.g. .. we do not want to be robots .. nor could we be .. the human body is constantlyl interacthing with the outside world via so many entrances .. not controlled by our aware self quite often.