IBM’s new cognitive computing business unit…

There are a lot of good stories on this. A good summary at The Economist, here. I’m particularly interested in the notion of cognitive computing. On the one hand, Watson looks to me to be a version of strong AI, using conventional high performance computing to drive an expert’s expert system. On the other hand, there are host of folks (including Dharmendra’s group out at IBM Almaden) who are using neurally-inspired architectures with an aim towards a new version of cognitive computing whereby the machine computes in ways that are like the way the human brain does. This latter approach is more interesting to me if only for its incredible efficiency (20 watts of energy in to power a human mind).

Dharmendra Modha’s IBM simulation: 10^14 synapses

It’s a milestone of sorts, the paper is here [pdf]. Here’s the response from Gary Marcus at the New Yorker. Do read all of the comments.

Big Blue’s Dharmendra Modha and Cat Neocortex simulation

Dharmendra’s team at IBM are making the news this morning. Here’s AP’s Jordan Robertson’s story.

Money quote:

A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they’ve simulated a cat’s cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has.