When British mathematician Alan Turing proposed in the 1950s that computers would be the best devices for the study of artificial intelligence he …

Someday, we might be able to carry around tiny, AI brains that can function without supercomputers, the internet or the cloud. Researchers from MIT say their new "brain-on-a-chip" design gets us one step closer to that future. A group of engineers put tens of thousands of artificial brain synapses, known as memristors, on a single chip that's smaller than a piece of confetti. In a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers explain how their brain-inspired chip was able to remember and recreate a gray-scale image of Captain America's shield and reliably alter an image of MIT's Killian Court by sharpening and blurring it. Those tests may seem minor, but the team believes the chip design could advance the development of small, portable AI devices and carry out complex computational tasks that today only supercomputers are capable of.

MIT engineers have designed a "brain-on-a-chip," smaller than a piece of confetti, that is made from tens of thousands of artificial brain synapses known as memristors -- silicon-based components that mimic the information-transmitting synapses in the human brain. The researchers borrowed from principles of metallurgy to fabricate each memristor from alloys of silver and copper, along with silicon. When they ran the chip through several visual tasks, the chip was able to "remember" stored images and reproduce them many times over, in versions that were crisper and cleaner compared with existing memristor designs made with unalloyed elements. Their results, published today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, demonstrate a promising new memristor design for neuromorphic devices -- electronics that are based on a new type of circuit that processes information in a way that mimics the brain's neural architecture. Such brain-inspired circuits could be built into small, portable devices, and would carry out complex computational tasks that only today's supercomputers can handle.