homeWelcome, sign in or click here to subscribe.login
     


 

 

News


Subscriber content preview

March 22, 2013

Strange But True!

Q. What can your brain do that even the best robotic device would find daunting?

A. In a flash, we can recognize scores of faces of parents, friends, colleagues, pets, whether in daylight or darkness, viewed from above or from the side — ”a task the computer vision system built into the most sophisticated robots can accomplish only haltingly,” say Tobi Delbruck and Terry Sejnowski in Scientific American magazine. Plus, we can multitask effortlessly, such as driving a car as we follow a ballgame on the radio. “Yet designing an electronic brain that would allow a robot to perform this simple combination of behaviors remains a distant prospect.” Also, our brains are better than Google and show a complexity of networking that rivals the Internet, with billions of nerve cells intersecting to create trillions of synaptic junctures.


 
. . .


To read this story in full login or purchase a subscription.



Previous columns:



Email or user name:
Password:
 
Forgot password? Click here.