Ever since the early days of modern computing in the 1940s, the biological metaphor has been irresistible. The first computers — room-size behemoths — were referred to as “giant brains” or “electronic brains,” in headlines and everyday speech. As computers improved and became capable of some tasks familiar to humans, like playing chess, the term used was “artificial intelligence.” DNA, it is said, is the original software.

A brain does its computing with a design drastically different from today’s computers. Its processors — neurons — are, in computing terms, massively distributed; there are billions in a human brain. These neuron processors are wrapped in its data memory devices — synapses — so that the brain’s paths of communication are extremely efficient and diverse, through the neuron’s axons, which conduct electrical impulses.

A machine that adopts that approach, Dr. Modha said, would represent “a crucial shift away from von Neumann computing.”

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In this paper we have shown how it is possible to use certain combinators on
relations to produce an interpretation of a class of clauses (Horn Clauses) in
predicate logic. The work was inspired by a particular view of the task of writing
certain kinds of program, but has not yet given rise to a system implemented
on a digital computer, although some initial studies have been made.

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