by STEVE LOHR
At the outset, Dharmendra S. Modha, the I.B.M. computer scientist leading the project, described the research grandly as “the quest to engineer the mind by reverse-engineering the brain.” The project embarked on supercomputer simulations intended to equal the complexity of animal brains — a cat and then a monkey. In science blogs and online forums, some neuroscientists sharply criticized I.B.M. for what they regarded as exaggerated claims of what the project could achieve.
These days at the I.B.M. Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., there is not a lot of talk of reverse-engineering the brain. Wide-ranging ambitions that narrow over time, Dr. Modha explained, are part of research and discovery, even if his earlier rhetoric was inflated or misunderstood.
“Deciding what not to do is just as important as deciding what to do,” Dr. Modha said. “We’re not trying to replicate the brain. That’s impossible. We don’t know how the brain works, really.”
The discussion and debate across disciplines has helped steer the research, as the team pursues the goals set out by Darpa, the Pentagon’s research agency. The technology produced, according to the guidelines, should have the characteristics of being self-organizing, able to “learn” instead of merely responding to conventional programming commands, and consuming very little power.
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What might such applications be, 5 or 10 years from now, if the technology proves successful? They would be the sorts of tasks that humans find effortless and that computers struggle with — the pattern recognition of seeing and identifying someone, walking down a crowded sidewalk without running into people, learning from experience. Specifically, the scientists say, the applications might include robots that can navigate a battlefield environment and be trained; low-power prosthetic devices that would allow blind people to see; and computerized health-care monitors that watch over people in nursing homes and send alerts to human workers if a resident’s behavior suggests illness.
It is an appealing vision, but there are formidable obstacles. The prototype chip has 256 neuron-like nodes, surrounded by more than 262,000 synaptic memory modules. That is impressive, until one considers that the human brain is estimated to house up to 100 billion neurons. In the Almaden research lab, a computer running the chip has learned to play the primitive video game Pong, correctly moving an on-screen paddle to hit a bouncing cursor. It can also recognize numbers 1 through 10 written by a person on a digital pad — most of the time. But the project still has a long way to go.
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