Saturday, June 25, 2016

Monday, June 6, 2016

Electronic Brain a.k.a Computer

In Chinese, they use the characters 電脳 to mean the computer. As Japanese, we also use it to express "cyber" or about computer related things.

電脳 literally  means electronic brain.

Recently,deep larning and AlphaGo has been talked about all over the news. At least in my side of the news world where I read my news. Electronic signals fire up in the neurons, and neural networks are being used to create Artificial Intelligence.

 Norbert Wiener was the person who invented and coined the term, cybernetics back in 1948, just 3 years after World War 2. I must imagine, around that time, most computers were made of vacuum tubes.  (In 1953, the first transistor computer was made)

Since then, computers have been used extensively in military calculations such as ballistics calculations, radar, etc. I believe computers greatly evolved because of ARPA and DARPA funding on many projects.

Computers nowadays fit in pockets, and many say that supercomputer is in your pocket.(smartphones) Well, that is sort of true, but we can't literally fit a supercomputer in a pocket because the number of GFlops of a smartphone is way smaller compared to a real supercomputer cluster.

But some day that may change. I predict that there will be a great leap in the quantum computer field and neural network field. When combined together, the fusion of these two powerful fields will make a big step closer into singularity.

Brain is still a mystery for some, but there is something I think is necessary to be implemented on an electronic brain. That is impulse. We have impulse to do certain things out of the blue, or triggered by some clear or unclear trigger. When impulse is implemented, the electronic brain will be more lifelike and like a human.

These are just my thoughts tonight.

See you soon in my next post!

Tsubasa Kato