computing at a Van Halen concert

So... one of the key features of the brain is that it is, in some sense, noisy.

I mean this in the sense of electronics, or communications "noise" (like the static when you listen to a radio station and your radio isn't exactly tuned right). This noise makes it hard to pick out the underlying "signal": the thing you are actually interested in.

Well, neurons in your brain are also pretty noisy: when presented with the same stimulus over and over again, they don't always respond the same way. Furthermore, the environment we live in is intrinsically noisy: very chaotic things like winds, cloud cover etc. mean that even the same tree will look slightly different each time you look at it.

Somehow, the noisy operation of your brain, functioning in this noisy world, still allows it to do things (like recognize that tree) that even super-advanced computers have trouble with. Those computers have none of this randomness associated with their operation. One possibility is that the noise in your brain is, somehow, crucial for it to function properly (as opposed to being a distraction that stops it from working).

Yesterday's Redwood Center talk was from some bay-area entrepreneurs who are trying to make computing machines that have some of this randomness built-in as part of their core functionality. Basically, like building a machine to work more like the brain.

They showed some pretty impressive results, although a fully functioning fake brain still lies in the very distant future.