Meet Spinnaker - Hal, is that you?

Ever since Hal decided to take things into his own hands in the seminal science fiction novel/movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, we have been fascinated with the idea of an artificial intelligence (AI) built into a man-made computer. The difficulty was not just in computer processing speeds and chips, but also in replicating the shear complexity of the human brain and consciousness. Now, scientists in the UK have unveiled a project called Spinnaker which takes us into a new age in the evolution of AI. Could this be an early ancestor of Hal and finally succeed in overturning the Turing Challenge?

According to Discovery News:

A computer with thousands of microprocessors is being built to mimic and model the function of millions of nerve networks in the brain.

The Spinnaker — short for "spiking neural network architecture" — system will not only help scientists better understand the complex interactions of brain cells, but it could also lead to fault-tolerant computers that, like the brain, work despite malfunctions in tiny circuits.

"You lose one neuron per second during your adult life. As they die, there doesn't seem to be any gross underperformance in the brain," said Steve Furber of the University of Manchester in the U.K., leader of the Spinnaker project.

(Read the full article: 'Brainbox' Computer Mimics Human Brain by Tracy Staedter, Discovery News at http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/08/02/brainbox_tec.html?category=technology&guid=20060802143030&&clik=news_main)

Discuss this subject further at the Universal Quest Group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/universalquest/