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Computer chips and brains are very different. Whilst many people have made many attempts
to reproduce the, let's call it three dimensional, way the human brain thinks and operates, it's
always been a simulation. It's a computer pretending to be a brain. It's a simple on-off
electronic circuit replicated billions of times, running software that tries to make
it think logical thoughts and make logical associations.
The brain does these things naturally, because it's a network, not a circuit. But now IBM
have released a new chip (although it's nto really a chip as we would think of it) which
really IS a brain, in the way we would think of one. Rather than using silicon, copper
and transistors, the new technology uses nano-fliuds, carrying charged atoms down canals which then
turn on and off switches as they pass, routing the fluid down one or more other paths.
Different charges in the fluid can affect the response of different gates, allowing
new routes to be opened up or old ones shut down elsewhere.
They can even turn on entire different subsets of switches on a different part of the board,
completely changing the nature of the circuit, how it works and what it does. Much like the
synapses of the human brain, this canal system puts the effort where it's needed, and can
create new, more efficient routes for data and calculations to be made along, then shut
them down, as demand requires.
The system bypasses the current constraints of computer and chip design - That there's
really only so much you can efficiently get out of a simple on/off silicon switch. It's
one of the reasons why people are looking at quantum computing for some applications,
for example. And this 'brain' chip could be far more suitable than silicon for, well,
most obviously, artificial intelligence, or codebreaking, but really thousands of applications
where a 'thought' process rather than calculation is required.
If it catches on, one day the computers in our head and the computers in our hands might
not be so very different.