Biomimicry

"Materials scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have created a new type of transistor that mimics the behavior of a synapse. The synaptic transistor simultaneously modulates the flow of information in a circuit and physically adapts to changing signals. The technology could lead to creation of a new kind of artificial intelligence which is embedded in the very architecture of a computer rather than software."

Computing hardware is composed of a series of binary switches; they're either on or off. The other piece of computational hardware we're familiar with, the brain, doesn't work anything like that. Rather than being on or off, individual neurons exhibit brief spikes of activity, and encode information in the pattern and timing of these spikes. The differences between the two have made it difficult to model neurons using computer hardware. In fact, the recent, successful generation of a flexible neural system required that each neuron be modeled separately in software in order to get the sort of spiking behavior real neurons display.

A new paper discusses the efficiency of neuronal computing and the ways in which we might better model the brain's function in future hardware. In some significant ways, we're clearly on the right track already.

Brains are the most powerful computers known. Now microchips built to mimic insects' nervous systems have been shown to successfully tackle technical computing problems like object recognition and data mining, researchers say.