IBM works on chips that behave like a brain

The chips represent a significant milestone in a six-year project that has involved 100 researchers and some $41 million in funding from the government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. IBM has also committed an undisclosed amount of money.

The prototypes offer further evidence of the growing importance of “parallel processing,’’ or computers doing multiple tasks simultaneously. That is important for rendering graphics and crunching large amounts of data.

The uses of the IBM chips so far are prosaic, such as steering a simulated car through a maze, or playing Pong. It may be a decade or longer before the chips make their way out of the lab and into actual products.

But what is important is not what the chips are doing, but how they are doing it, says Giulio Tononi, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who worked with IBM on the project.

The chips’ ability to adapt to types of information that it wasn’t specifically programmed to expect is a key feature.

“There’s a lot of work to do still, but the most important thing is usually the first step,’’ Tononi said. “And this is not one step, it’s a few steps.’’

Technologists have long imagined computers that learn like humans. Your iPhone or Google’s servers can be programmed to predict certain behavior based on past events. But the techniques being explored by IBM and other companies and university research labs around “cognitive computing’’ could lead to chips that are better able to adapt to unexpected information.

IBM’s interest in the chips lies in their ability to potentially help process real-world signals such as temperature or sound or motion and make sense of them for computers.

IBM is a leader in a movement to link physical infrastructure, such as power plants or traffic lights, and information technology, such as servers and software, that help regulate their functions. Such projects can be made more efficient with tools to monitor the myriad analog signals present in those environments.