New Hardware Needed For Future Computational Brain

schliz writes "Salk Institute director Terrence Sejnowski has called for more power-efficient, parallel computing architecture to support future robots that could keep up with the human brain. While human brains had 100 billion neurons and required only 20 Watts of energy, today's most powerful supercomputer, the 2.57 PFlop Chinese Tianhe-1A, requires four megawatts, and still has trouble with vision, motion, and 'common sense,' he said."

Re:still has trouble with...

[inpher]

I think one mistake (besides the power requirements) that people make is to assume "if you build it it will work from the start", the human brain needs over ten year to develop even mediocre common sense and awareness of its surroundings. We should not be able to just build the hardware, install the software, flip a switch and then expect the machine to fully function the first year even. A learning period for the machine is to be expected (though it might be accelerated to some degree) if it is going to work like a human thinks.

Neurons are the wrong number

[gweihir]

The significant number is interconnect. In that area electronics is several orders of magnitude farther behind. Far enough that is seems doubtful something even remotely like the interconnect of a human brain can be reached artificially.

Side note: Comparing neurons and transistors, as is often done in the popular (but not very knowledgeable) press, is completely invalid as well. You need to compare neurons more to a micro-controller each.

Re:Apples and oranges...

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a way, but it takes about 18 years plus 9 months and a male and a female participant...

Also, what you end up with is usually an unemployed intelligence looking for something to do. And they don't always succeed. It's not obvious to me that we need more human intelligences. Maybe we need more and faster idiot savant machines, ones that excel at mundane things like driving road vehicles, doing laundry, loading dishwashers, sorting bills in chronological order. The boring stuff.

Machine intelligence is not a hardware problem...

[divisionbyzero]

It's a software problem.