Ditch the programmers

摘要

Your smartphone is amazing, but ask it to do something it doesn't have an app for and it just sits there. Without programmers to write apps, computers are useless. That could soon change. DeepMind Technologies, a London-based artificial-intelligence firm acquired by Google this year, has revealed that it is designing computers that combine the way ordinary computers work with the way the human brain works. They call this hybrid device a Neural Turing Machine. The hope is it won't need programmers, and will instead program itself. Neural networks, which make up half of DeepMind's computer architecture, have been around for decades but are receiving renewed attention as more powerful computers take advantage of them. The idea is to split processing across a network of artificial "neurons", simple units that process an input and pass it on. These networks are good at learning to recognise pieces of data and classify them into categories. Facebook recently trained a neural network to identify faces with near-human accuracy (read more about how computers are learning to see, on page 24).