For as fast and powerful as computers have become, they still pose no match for the human brain. Sure, a computer specifically programmed to perform singular task such as, say, playing chess can give a human a run for his or her money, but when we measure a computer against the entirety of what a human mind is capable of, it’s not really all that close. * Over the past few years, scientists, in a variety of ways, have tried to get a super computer to mimic the complexity and raw processing power of the human brain. According to biologists, the human brain has approximately 90 billion nerve cells which are linked together by, quite literally, trillions of connections called synapses. Taken together, this system of elaborate connections within the brain provides “hundreds of trillions of different pathways that brain signals travel through.” * In an effort to mimic this digitally, scientists a few years ago needed more than 82,000 processors running on one of the world’s fastest supercomputers to mimic just 1 second of a normal human’s brain activity. * More recently, a research study found that the human brain can hold 10 times as much information as previously thought. All told, scientists now believe that the capacity of the human brain is about a petabyte. * (Petabyte = almost as much information as the World Wide Web!) (Yahoo.com/Tech)
