Energy Efficient "Brain" Chips

Thanks for post on this spectacular piece. A dream which started in Africa from the "frustration" of digitalization of ping-pong, to the epiphany to emulate the efficiency and shortcomings of the chaotic human brain. Well does "to err is to computer" sounds like a good sell? Neurogrid working on "Neuromorphic Engineering" might tell us an answer soon.

"As transistors shrink, the reliability of digital calculation will at some point fall off a cliff, a result of the “fundamental laws of physics,” says Sarpeshkar. Many people place that statistical precipice at a transistor size of 9 nanometers, about 80 silicon atoms wide. Some engineers say that today’s digital computers are already running into reliability problems. In July a man in New Hampshire bought a pack of cigarettes at a gas station, according to news reports, only to discover his bank account had been debited $23,148,855,308,184,500. (The error was corrected, and the man’s $15 overdraft fee was refunded the next day.) We may never know whether this error arose from a single transistor in a bank’s computer system accidentally flipping from a 1 to a 0, but that is exactly the kind of error that silicon-chip designers fear."

The hope is in here:

"The most important achievement of Boahen’s Neurogrid, therefore, may be in re-creating not the brain’s efficiency but its versatility. Terrence Sejnowski, a computational neuro­scientist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, believes that neural noise can contribute to human creativity."