With Spaun, Technology Moves One Step Closer to Real Artificial Intelligence

If you thought Siri was smart, wait until you get a load of Spaun. Created by neuroscientist Chris Eliasmith at the University of Waterloo in Canada, Spaun is "the world's largest simulation of a functioning brain," according to a report from Canada.com. Spaun is able to recognize numbers and memorize lists and patterns and reproduce them on command. This makes Spaun unique among its virtual peers, since other large-scale models of the brain "don't do anything," Eliasmith said. Spaun, which stands for Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network, has 2.5 million simulated neurons organized into subsystems to resemble the prefrontal cortex, basil ganglia, thalamus and other cognitive machinery in the brain.