This million-core supercomputer inspired by the human brain breaks all the rules
SpiNNaker's spiking neural network mimics the human brain, and could fuel breakthroughs in robotics and health.
Historically, the difficulty in making computers that could mimic the brain largely comes down to connectivity. Neurons — the nerve fibres that travel throughout the body and largely terminate in the brain — each have thousands of inputs and thousands of outputs. Computing systems struggle with anything on a similar scale.
Currently, it models one percent of the human brain, so a SpiNNaker system that could give a robot human-level cognition would require something of an engineering miracle.
