Neurocomputers /article Review :: essays research papers fc

The dream of artificial intelligence that would allow a computer to learn, and thus get really smart, has proven to be something of a incubus so far. That failure has lead biomedical engineer William Ditto and his team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University to look beyond silicon and point beyond light chips. Ditto points out that todays processors may be a lot faster, but theyre not a telephone number smarter than they were 40 years ago. Dittos processor is designed with living tissue. The tissue being nerve cells taken from leeches because they argon big, easy to use and they learn quickly. Neurons are able to process images more than a million times faster than the fastest computer (Sincell, 2000). The present review has two purposes (a) to enlighten the reader that the prosecution to build smart computers, microchip engineers look beyond silicon and light to living nerve cells and (b) to suggest that this future technology could be the basi s of the contiguous great computer wave.The article being discussed out of Discover magazine states that brains derive tremendous problem solving abilities from two characteristics of their individual cells. First, a neuron nookie be in any one of thousands of different states, allowing it to store more information that a transistor, which has only two states, on and off (Sincell, 2000). Second, neurons can choose which other neurons to interact with by rearranging their own synaptic connections.Scientists have developed software that attempts to imitate the brains learning process employ only the yes-no binary logic of digital computers with all the connections in a personal computer wired back at the factory. Breaking a adept one of these connections usually crashes the computer.This is not a problem for a neurocomputer Ditto says, because dynamic chaotic systems like these naturally self-organize. An example of this would be the human heart. An obscure heart neuron simply sp arks chaotically, without apparent intelligence. But when it is a part of the neuronal network in a living heart, it synchronizes with all the other neurons to reach a steady heartbeat (Sincell 2000). The neurocomputer would work in a similar way. If a computer programmer posed a problem to a parade of neurons, such as create a regular heartbeat, the neurons would then figure out through trial and error how to rewire their own circuits to produce a steady rhythmic beat.