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By Kwabena Boahen

A COMPUTER THAT WORKS LIKE THE BRAIN

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Kwabena Boahen is the principal investigator at the Brains in Silicon lab at Stanford. He writes of himself:

“Being a scientist at heart, I want to understand how cognition arises from neuronal properties. Being an engineer by training, I am using silicon integrated circuits to emulate the way neurons compute, linking the seemingly disparate fields of electronics and computer science with neurobiology and medicine”.

For additional information about the presenter go to

http://www.ted.com/speakers/kwabena_boahen.html

Kwabena Boahen wants to understand how brains work -- and to build a computer that works like the brain by reverse-engineering the nervous system. His group at Stanford is developing Neurogrid, a hardware platform that will emulate the cortex’s inner workings.

1 Translate into Russian:

Figure out, shuffle, estimate, lockstep, convergence, gate, flow, flow through, current, outstrip, neuron, ion channel, potassium, protein, sneak through, pore, sporadic flow, inherent, extract, core, line up, shrink, at random, crash, bottleneck, network, information processing, pop into mind, drain, redundant, redundancy, flawless, brain, circuit, retina, stream, correspond to, blueprint, distribute, get clobbered.

2 Find the words with the opposite meaning:

Watch the video “A computer that works like the brain”

http://www.ted.com/talks/kwabena_boahen_on_a_computer_that_works_like_the_brain.html

While watching:

Fill in the gaps:

a) When computers were first introduced, they were said to be a million times faster than neurons. People were really excited. They thought they would soon outstrip the ______ of the brain.

b) In the computer, you have all the data going through the ______ ______ ______, and any piece of data basically has to go through that bottleneck, whereas in the brain, what you have is these ______, and the data just really _____ through a network of connections among the neurons.

c) The net is doing the work in the brain. If you just look at these two pictures, these kind of words pop into your mind. This is ______ and it's ______ -- it's like cars on a freeway, everything has to happen in ______ -- whereas this is parallel and it's _______. Information processing is very ______ and ______.

d) The devices that computers use are what's called a transistor. This electrode here, called the ______, controls the flow of ______ from the source to the drain -- these two electrodes.

e) And these are individual ______ ______ that are flowing through that pore. Now, this pore can open and close. But, when it's open, because these ions have to line up and flow through, one at a time, you get a kind of ______, not ______ -- it's a sporadic flow of current.

f) Now, in a few years’ time, by 2015, we will ______ transistors so much. This is what Intel does to keep adding more ______ onto the chip. Or your ______ ______ that you have now can carry one gigabyte of stuff on them -- before, it was 256.

g) The current will turn on and off ______, even when it's supposed to be on. And that means your computer is going to get its ones and zeros mixed up, and that's going to ______ your machine.

h) It makes the brain inherently ______. What you have here is a system where you store data locally. And it's ______, because each of these steps has to be flawless, otherwise you lose that data, whereas in the brain, you have a system that stores data in a distributed way, and it's robust.

i) The ______ chip extracts four different kinds of information. It ______ regions with dark contrast, which will show up on the video as red.

After watching:

1 Match the words in A with the words in B:

2 Answer the questions:

a) What computer is the fastest in the world? How many processors has it got? What is its speed?

b) How much computation does the brain do?

c) How much energy does the brain use?

d) Where does all the data go in the computer?

e) What is common between the brain and computer’s work?

f) What is the difference between information processing in the brain and in a computer?

g) What device does a computer use? What is the principle of its work?

h) Why can small transistor crash your computer?

i) What kind of a computer is Kwabena dreaming about?

3 Decide if the statements are true or false:

a) Computers are a million times faster than neurons.

b) The fastest computers use the power of all households in the US.

c) The process in which neurons send little pulses of electricity to each other is called a synapse.

d) In the brain the data flows through a network of synapses.

e) Computer’s information processing is serial and rigid.

f) Ion channel is a little protein molecule in the membrane of the cell.

g) A transistor corresponds to about 12 ion channels.

h) The transistor is going to become so small that it corresponds to thousand ion channels.