The Path Toward Brain-Like Computers

Since the advent of computing, people have lauded technology's potential to act as a human brain. In truth, computers have worked nothing at all like a brain for most of their history. In recent years, though, they've been getting closer. In a new paper in Nature,"Towards Spike-based Machine Intelligence with Neuromorphic Computing," Priyadarshini Panda and her co-authors Kaushik Roy and Akhilesh Jaiswal, both at Purdue University, provide an overview of the computer's long and ongoing road to achieving something akin to the thinking power of the brain. Panda, assistant professor of electrical engineering, emphasizes that there's still nothing that acts like a brain - not least in part because much of how the brain works is still a mystery.