New IBM computer chip mimics the human brain

Previous submissions of the same story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2900593

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899885

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899850

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899643

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899299 <- some discussion

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2898229 <- lots of comments

It appears that the AI is, as they say, 'baked in':

"systems built with these chips won’t be programmed the same way traditional computers are today. Rather, cognitive computers are expected to learn through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses, and remember – and learn from – the outcomes, mimicking the brains structural and synaptic plasticity."

(Quote from the original press release: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/35251.wss)

This is either marketing fluff, or the most important story I've read this year.

Its cute. Interesting how they're busting on modern day computers and calling them calculators. I think we have the same kind of hype that happened 30 years back with early AI. The new chips are just fancy pattern matchers. And we still don't have a clue how higher level thinking works in the brain.

Well guess what, humans and brains are calculators too, its just that we can calculate on a long term basis on non-mathematical entities.