“Imagine traffic lights that can integrate sights, sounds and smells and flag unsafe intersections before disaster happens,” said Dharmendra Modha, the project leader for IBM Research. “Or imagine cognitive co-processors that turn servers, laptops, tablets and phones into machines that can interact better with their environments.”

IBM on Thursday announced it has created a chip designed to imitate the human brain’s ability to understand its surroundings, act on things that happen around it and make sense of complex data.

Instead of requiring the type of programming that computers have needed for the past half-century, the experimental chip will let a new generation of computers, called “cognitive computers,” learn through their experiences and form their own theories about what those experiences mean.

The chips revealed Thursday are a step in a project called SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics). The two chip prototypes are a step toward letting computers “reason” instead of reacting solely based on data that has been pre-programmed, IBM says.

read more here:  http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/08/18/ibm.brain.chip/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2391320,00.asp