ABOVE: SMART CHIP: A neuromorphic chip designed by the Heidelberg group of physicist Karlheinz Meier. The chip features 384 artificial neurons connected by 100,000 synapses, and operates approximately 100,000 times faster than the speed at which the brain computes.
© HEIDELBERG UNIVERSITY
In 2012, computer scientist Dharmendra Modha used a powerful supercomputer to simulate the activity of more than 500 billion neurons—more, even, than the 85 billion or so neurons in the human brain. It was the culmination of almost a decade of work, as Modha progressed from simulating the brains of rodents and cats to something on the scale of humans.
The simulation consumed enormous computational resources—1.5 million processors and 1.5 petabytes (1.5 million gigabytes) of memory—and was still agonizingly slow, 1,500 times slower than the brain computes. Modha estimates that to run it in biological real time would have required 12 gigawatts of energy, about six times the maximum ...
