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.
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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 November 2009 it was announced that a cat-scale
neocortex had been successfully simulated on a Blue Gene P supercomputer. In October 2011 a small, demonstration, neuromorphic
chip was unveiled that could recognise digits and learn to play a game of pong. The ultimate aim is to build a robot with
cat-level intelligence.
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The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to reverse engineer the mammalian 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. This is
approximately the scale of a honey bee. A full-scale human brain simulation of 100 billion neurons is anticipated by 2023,
provided sufficient funding is secured. In 2012 the EU will decide whether to award €1 billion in funding.
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SpiNNaker is a massively-parallel neuromorphic computing architecture designed to model very large, biologically-plausible, spiking neural networks in real-time.
A SpiNNaker machine will consist of a million microprocessor cores and be be capable of simulating a billion neurons.
This equates to approximately the scale of a cat brain or 1% of a human brain.
This is a British project lead by Professor Steve Furber at Manchester University and involving collaborators from the universities of Southampton, Cambridge, and Sheffield.
The million-neuron machine is expected to be constructed by the end of 2012.
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Brain Corporation is a small research company that is developing novel algorithms and microprocessors
which are modeled on biological nervous systems. The research aims to facilitate future applications in visual perception,
motor control, and autonomous navigation. The intention is to equip consumer devices, such as mobile phones or
household robots, with artificial nervous systems.
The company was founded in 2009 by computational neuroscientist Eugene Izhikevich and neuroscientist/entrepreneur Allen Gruber.
The research is funded by Qualcomm and the company is hosted on the Qualcomm campus in San Diego, California.
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The BrainScaleS project aims to understand information processing in the brain at different scales ranging
from individual neurons to whole functional brain areas. The research involves three approaches: in vivo
biological experimentation, simulation on petascale supercomputers, and the construction of neuromorphic hardware.
The neuromorphic hardware is based around wafer-scale analog VLSI. Each silicon wafer contains 384 chips, each
of which implements over 100,000 synapses and up to 512 spiking neurons. This results in a total of ~45 million
synapses and 200,000 neurons per wafer.
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OpenWorm is an attempt to build a complete cellular-level simulation of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans.
Of the 959 cells in the hermaphrodite, 302 are neurons and 95 are muscle cells. The simulation will model
electrical activity in all the muscles and neurons. An integrated soft-body physics simulation will also model body
movement and physical forces within the worm and from its environment.
The idea is that only by emulating an organism's complete nervous system can we come to truly understand it.
The effort is being treated as a first step towards simulating larger nervous systems including, ultimately,
the human brain. The project is an international collaboration that started in early 2011.
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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.
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