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 neuromorphic chip was unveiled
that could recognise digits and 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 ~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.
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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 that 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 co-founded in 2009 by computational neuroscientist Eugene Izhikevich. The research is funded by Qualcomm
and the company is hosted on the Qualcomm campus in San Diego, California. The number of staff is unknown, but thought
to be between 10 and 20 people.
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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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The synthetic cognition group at Los Alamos National Laboratory is building a supercomputer
simulation of the human visual system. They are using the IBM Roadrunner, which in 2008 was
the world's fastest supercomputer.
The simulations run at a peak of 1.14 PFLOPS.
They have simulated the primate visual system including retina, LGN, and visual
cortex V1, V2, and V4. The research aims to prepare for the time when supercomputers
become sufficiently powerful to simulate an entire human brain.
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The Silicon Synapse is a microprocessor built in 2011 by researchers at MIT. It models the ion channels found in a single biological synapse.
The chip contains around 400 transistors and operates using analog signals, not digital. The electical current flows through the transistors just
as ions flow through ion channels in a neuron. This approach is known as analog neuromorphic VLSI.
The researchers plan to use the chip to investigate how biological synapses are strengthened and weakened.
Eventually they intend to build larger systems that model neural functions such as the visual system.
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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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