The dream of artificial intelligence that would allow a computer to learn, and thus get really smart, has proven to be something of a nightmare so far. That failure has led Ditto and his team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University to look beyond silicon and even beyond light chips. Now we can use living tissue. And they learn quickly. Although seemingly far-fetched, Ditto's belief that neurons could be the basis of the next great computer wave can be infectious.
Brains derive awesome problem-solving abilities from two characteristics of their individual cells.
First, a neuron can be in any one of thousands of different states, allowing it to store more information than a transistor, which has only two states, on and off. Second, neurons can choose which other neurons to talk to by rearranging their own synaptic connections. Neurobiologists call this self-organization. Although scientists have developed software that attempts to mimic the brain's learning process using only the yes-no binary logic of digital computers, all the connections in a personal computer are wired back at the factory. Breaking a single one of these connections usually crashes the computer.