When Computers Get Brains | Innovations: "So much happened last week, what with Wall Street in need of a sedative and Gerard Depardieu in need of a bathroom, you probably missed the news that a team led by IBM has created a computer chip that mimics how a brain works.
Big deal, right? Hadn’t they already created the computer that delivered a smackdown of those two “Jeopardy” whizzes turned hapless humans?
Actually, this latest creation is something very different and potentially more momentous. Watson, the “Jeopardy” god, is a ridiculously powerful computer that, nonetheless, operated in a fairly conventional way—except it was retrieving info from a database of more than 200 million pages of content.
But the new invention, the “cognitive” computer chip, is a leap into uncharted territory. The chips, as they become more sophisticated, could eventually copy the brain’s ability to sense surroundings, recognize patterns, and—dare I say it—learn on their own."
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