Scientists gingerly tap into brain's power
A company called Cyberkinetics has placed an implant into a quadriplegic's brain and has gotten him to control a cursor with a good degree of success (70%) in a game of Pong.

While this is certainly interesting in-and-of itself, what is equally interesting is the fact that this happens by doing complex analysis of 100 neurons in near-real-time. Assuming, as stated in the article, that more neurons means more accuracy, but more computation power required, it shows that by the time we're supposed to have computers with the same computing capacity as the brain (around 2020 by some estimates), we may just get to the point where we have enough computational power to create a reasonably sophisticated brain-computer interface.

Note that doing anything more complicated than moving a cursor around the screen (such as generalized communications) will probably require many orders of magnitude more processing and understanding than is currently available.

Also nice to see my alma mater getting a brief mention near the bottom.

Yahoo! News - Scientists gingerly tap into brain's power
- posted @ 1:22 PM