With Halloween Around the Corner, Super Computers are getting "Brainy"

Just when you thought supercomputer technology yielded the optimum performance, a new project arises that is literally mind blowing. An article by CNN highlights the Human Brain Project, a billion-dollar plan to replicate the human brain inside a supercomputer.

What sounds like a science-fiction movie coming true, is actually a project geared toward curing conditions like depression, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's. This project may change the methods of medical imaging for those conditions because it attempts to simulate the tangles of neurons and synapses that power high-functioning thoughts, like moving and reasoning.

The Human Brain Project is piggy-backing off a project in Switzerland that studied tiny slivers of rodent gray matter and fed a computer with huge amounts of data and algorithms. Now that breakthroughs have been made in predicting thought, there is a need for more funding and supercomputers to expand the project.

The bold claims of the project have dubbed the scientists as "Team Frankenstein" and their computer as "Skynet," the artificial intelligence that unleashed a robot war upon Earth in the "Terminator" films.

Sean Hill, the neuroscientist on the project laughs at the comparisons and says that the supercomputer will mostly be used for educational purposes and it will allow scientists to conduct experiments without the need of probing in human skulls.

To read more about the project, check out the CNN article here.