IBM’s new cognitive computing business unit…

There are a lot of good stories on this. A good summary at The Economist, here. I’m particularly interested in the notion of cognitive computing. On the one hand, Watson looks to me to be a version of strong AI, using conventional high performance computing to drive an expert’s expert system. On the other hand, there are host of folks (including Dharmendra’s group out at IBM Almaden) who are using neurally-inspired architectures with an aim towards a new version of cognitive computing whereby the machine computes in ways that are like the way the human brain does. This latter approach is more interesting to me if only for its incredible efficiency (20 watts of energy in to power a human mind).