Stefan Mileschin

Researchers at the USA's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency want to work out how computers can mimic a key portion of our brain.

The group called for information on how it could develop systems that solve "extraordinarily difficult recognition problems in real-time".

According to Network World, systems presently only offer partial solutions to this problem.

They can't scale to larger, more complex datasets, and are "compute intensive, exhibit limited parallelism, and require high precision arithmetic".

DARPA wants to mimic the neocortex which is used in higher brain functions such as sensory perception, motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought and language.

The idea is to develop a "Cortical Processor" based on Hierarchical Temporal Memory.

Its "call for information" said that computing was at a point where some basic algorithmic principles had been spotted and merged into machine learning and neural network techniques.

These algorithms were inspired by neural models, in particular neocortex, and can recognise complex spatial and temporal patterns and can adapt to changing environments.

http://news.techeye.net/science/darp...imic-the-brain