In an era when PCs perform like supercomputers, and
supercomputers carry out inhuman feats of calculation, some of
the brightest minds in Silicon Valley say there are still
crucial ways in which a computer can't match the problem-solving
abilities of our own brains. But today, at a supercomputing
conference in Portland, Ore., a team of scientists from IBM's
Almaden Research Lab and several other Bay Area institutions are
planning to announce two developments that could one day lead to
a new kind of computer — one that uses specially designed
hardware and software to mimic what's inside our heads.
Researchers from IBM and the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory say they have performed a computer simulation that
matches the scale and complexity of a cat's brain, and project
members from IBM and Stanford have developed an algorithm for
mapping the human brain at new levels of detail. Eventually,
scientists hope that detailed knowledge will help them build a
computer that replicates the more complex working of