NRI builds chip that mimics human brain

Researchers have reported their achievement in the science journal Nature.

Sarpeshkar has stressed that the new electronic circuit is not one of those thinking machines found in science fiction. This circuit, which took two decades in the making, cannot learn the way a brain can.

"No one is going to build a brain for the next 100 to 200 years. The brain is so smart and so good at processing sensory data and so energy efficient and compact it will take at least a century to create," he said.

But this is the first time a circuit inspired by the brain’s cortex — the centre of intelligence — has been fashioned in computer hardware.

Sarpeshkar said he believes the tiny electronic circuit he and others have built on a "very low-power chip" could lead to the development of computers that could perform perceptual tasks such as recognising the face in a crowd or recognising a voice or handwriting. These are tasks computers now do poorly, if at all, he said.