Molecule-Sized Computer Mimics Human Brain At Work
A team of researchers from Japan and Michigan have built a molecular computer whose operation mimics a human brain. The tiny circuit, comprised of organic molecules on a gold substrate, is capable of super-fast concurrent calculations that rival the firing of neurons. When it comes to multitasking, even the fastest computers are still miles behind the human brain. Neurons only fire about a thousand times per second -- way slower than the petaflops achieved by today's fastest digital processors -- yet people are still smarter than computers. "I can see you, recognize you, talk with you, and hear someone walking by in the hallway almost instantaneously, a Herculean task for even the fastest computer," physicist Ranjit Pati of Michigan Technological University says in a press release. This is because digital computers process information sequentially, while the brain is a tangled web. Electrical impulses in the brain follow complex neurological networks involving several concurrent...