Building Brains

I have just finished watching Professor Steve Furber's Dennis Gabor Lecture 2010: Building Brains. It's a concise, yet fascinating look at the pace of computer development over the past six decades and the challenges posed as we push up against limits of fabrication technology. Furber touches on some parallels and differences between biological brains and electronic computers and briefly introduces his group's work on SpiNNaker, a project that uses silicon to mimic (in simplified form) the way that braincells are wired together, to explore resilience in the face of inherent unreliability.

The lecture appealed to me on a number of different levels: As a geek I'm interested in the development of microprocessors and computers in general. As a middle–aged British geek I appreciate Furber's work on the BBC Micro and especially the ARM microprocessor, which is a thing of beauty. As someone who has to fix things when they break, I am keen on redundancy and resilience. Finally, as the father of a stroke survivor, I marvel at the brain's ability to rewire itself and 'route around' dead circuits and I believe there's a lot we can learn from this that could help computer engineers and other people with brains.