Artificial Brains - The quest to build sentient machines

Artificial brains are man-made machines that are just as intelligent, creative, and self-aware as humans. No such machine has yet been built, but it is only a matter of time. This website tracks the latest scientific and technological progress. » read more…

Neuromorphic hardware

DARPA SyNAPSE Program

SyNAPSE is a DARPA-funded program to develop neuromorphic microprocessor systems that match the intelligence, physical size, and low power consumption of animal brains. Their approach is to first test neural networks in simulation on a supercomputer. The networks are then constructed directly in hardware - this increases speed while reducing size and power requirements. In October 2011 a prototype neuromorphic chip containing 256 neurons was demonstrated. Work is currently ongoing to build a multi-chip system capable of emulating 1 million spiking neurons and 1 billion synapses directly in hardware.

SpiNNaker Machine

SpiNNaker is a massively-parallel neuromorphic computing architecture designed to model large, biologically plausible, spiking neural networks.

Brain Corporation

A small research company that is developing novel algorithms and microprocessors which are modeled on biological nervous systems.

BrainScaleS project

Neuromorphic hardware is based on wafer-scale analog VLSI. Each wafer implements ~200,000 spiking neurons and 49 million synapses.

Neurogrid

Brains in Silicon group at Stanford University has built a board with 16 neuromorphic processors that implements 1 million spiking neurons.

CogniMem

This Californian company has built a chip called CM1K which implements 1,024 neurons. Multiple chips can be connected for up to 40,000 neurons.

Further projects:

Biomimetric Real-time Cortex (BioRC) - using carbon nanotubes.
MIT's Silicon Synapse - analog processor, 400 transistors.
Intel's neuromorphic hardware - spintronics and memristors.

Neural network simulation

Blue Brain Project

The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to reverse engineer the human brain and to recreate it in a molecular-level computer simulation. The project was founded in May 2005 by Henry Markram at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. The simulations are carried out on an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer, hence the name Blue Brain. As of November 2011 the largest simulations were of mesocircuits containing around 1 million neurons and 1 billion synapses. A full-scale human brain simulation of 86 billion neurons is targeted for 2023.

Spaun brain simulation

Spaun is a biologically-realistic brain simulation that contains 2.5 million neurons. It can perform simple arithmetic and other tasks.

SpikeFun

A large-scale, biologically realistic neural network simulator that runs on a standard Windows PC. Simulation of 8 million neurons achieved.

IBM Neural Simulator

Software that simulates large-scale biologically realistic neural networks. Written in C++ and run on an IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer.

OpenWorm

OpenWorm is an attempt to build a complete cellular-level simulation of the nematode worm C. elegans, including all 302 neurons.

Synthetic Cognition at LANL

Building a supercomputer simulation of the human visual system using IBM Roadrunner - the world's fastest supercomputer in 2008.

Related research

Google X Lab

The Google X Lab is a secret laboratory where Google experiments with future technologies. The projects they're working on are not public knowledge, but they are thought to include robotics and artificial intelligence. Details about the lab first came to light in a New York Times article in November 2011. That article says the lab is at an undisclosed location in the Bay Area, California. The Google founders are well-known to be interested in AI and have long held ambitions in that direction. In 2006 an internal company memo said that Google wants to have the world's top AI research laboratory.