Jame5

Just a quick update with some news on IBM’s cognitive computing project which Wired describes in a nutshell as follows:

In what could be one of the most ambitious computing projects ever, neuroscientists, computer engineers and psychologists are coming together in a bid to create an entirely new computing architecture that can simulate the brain’s abilities for perception, interaction and cognition. All that, while being small enough to fit into a lunch box and consuming extremely small amounts of power.

Together with the Blue Brain project as well as advances in memristor based electronics this project’s stated goal of building what amounts to a ‘brain in a lunch box’ is moving a lot of the science fiction in Jame5 into the realm of engineering. The fact that barely 18 months passed since Jame5’s initial publication speaks volumes about what is to be expected in the not so distant future. For a more technical background there is some very good material online about IBM Research’s Almaden Institute Conference on Cognitive Computing.

These guys are not playing around.