A brain-like computer for cognitive software applications: the Ersatz Brain project

We want to design a suitable computer for the efficient execution of the software now being developed that displays human-like cognitive abilities. Examples of these potential software applications include natural language understanding, text processing, conceptually based Internet search, natural human-computer interfaces, cognitively based data mining, sensor fusion, and image understanding. Requirements of the proposed software are primary in shaping our hardware design. The hardware architecture design is based on a few ideas taken from the anatomy of mammalian neo-cortex. In common with other such attempts it is a massively parallel, two-dimensional array of CPUs and their associated memory. However, the design used in this project: (1) uses an approximation to cortical computation called the network of networks which holds that the basic computing unit in the cortex is not a single neuron but small groups of them working together in attractor networks; and (2) assumes connections in cortex are very sparse. The resulting architecture depends largely on local data movement.