A
wetware computer is an organic computer (also known as an
artificial organic brain or a
neurocomputer) built from living neurons.
Professor Bill Ditto, at the
Georgia Institute of TechnologyThe Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly called Georgia Tech, Tech, and GT, is a public, coeducational research university in Atlanta, Georgia in the United States...
, is the primary researcher driving the creation of these artificially constructed, but still organic
brainThe brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate, and most invertebrate, animals. Some primitive animals such as jellyfish and starfish have a decentralized nervous system without a brain, while sponges lack any nervous system at all...
s.
Discussion
Ask a question about 'Wetware computer' Start a new discussion about 'Wetware computer' Answer questions from other users |
A
wetware computer is an organic computer (also known as an
artificial organic brain or a
neurocomputer) built from living neurons.
Professor Bill Ditto, at the
Georgia Institute of TechnologyThe Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly called Georgia Tech, Tech, and GT, is a public, coeducational research university in Atlanta, Georgia in the United States...
, is the primary researcher driving the creation of these artificially constructed, but still organic
brainThe brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate, and most invertebrate, animals. Some primitive animals such as jellyfish and starfish have a decentralized nervous system without a brain, while sponges lack any nervous system at all...
s. One prototype is constructed from
leechLeeches are annelids comprising the subclass Hirudinea. There are freshwater, terrestrial, and marine leeches. Like the Oligochaeta, they share the presence of a clitellum. Like earthworms, leeches are hermaphrodites...
neurons, and is capable of performing simple
arithmeticArithmetic or arithmetics is the oldest and most elementary branch of mathematics, used by almost everyone, for tasks ranging from simple day-to-day counting to advanced science and business calculations, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division...
operations. The concepts are still being researched and prototyped, but in the near future, it is expected that artificially constructed organic brains, even though they are still considerably simpler in design than animal brains, should be capable of simple pattern recognition tasks such as
handwriting recognitionHandwriting recognition is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret intelligible handwritten input from sources such as paper documents, photographs, touch-screens and other devices. The image of the written text may be sensed "off line" from a piece of paper by optical scanning or...
.
See also
- Wetware (brain)
The term wetware is used to describe the embodiment of the concepts of the physical construct known as the central nervous system and the mental construct known as the human mind...
- Artificial neural network
An artificial neural network , usually called "neural network" , is a mathematical model or computational model that tries to simulate the structure and/or functional aspects of biological neural networks. It consists of an interconnected group of artificial neurons and processes information using...
- Unconventional computing
Unconventional computing is computing by a wide range of new or unusual methods. It is also known as alternative computing. The different methods of unconventional computing include optical computing, quantum computing, chemical computing, natural computing, biologically-inspired computing, wetware...
- Chemical computer
A chemical computer, also called reaction-diffusion computer, BZ computer or gooware computer is an unconventional computer based on a semi-solid chemical "soup" where data is represented by varying concentrations of chemicals. The computations are performed by naturally occurring chemical reactions...
- Neuron
A neuron is an excitable cell in the nervous system that processes and transmits information by electrochemical signaling. Neurons are the core components of the brain, the vertebrate spinal cord, the invertebrate ventral nerve cord, and the peripheral nerves...
- Quantum computer
A quantum computer is a device for computation that makes direct use of quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. The basic principle behind quantum computation is that quantum properties can be used to represent data and perform operations...
External links