Race to build an artificial brain

摘要

Phase-change materials are competing with at least three other approaches to brain-like computing. In the Blue Brain Project, Henry Markram's group at the Swiss Institute for Technology in Lausanne aims to create a software model of brain biochemistry on a supercomputer. And this week, the University of Manchester in the UK began building Spinnaker - a 1-billion-neuron computer - using smartphone microprocessors that model 18,000 neurons each. The connection strength between neurons is stored using on-chip memory.