Google conjures artificial brain with billion connections

Google has done the unthinkable -- the creation of an 'artificial brain' from 16,000 computer processors, with more than a billion connections.

The team led by Google's Jeff Dean then fed it random images culled from 10 million YouTube videos - and let it 'learn' by itself.

Surprisingly, the machine focused in on cats. "We never told it during the training 'this is a cat'," said Dean. "It basically invented the concept of a cat."

"Contrary to what appears to be a widely-held intuition, our experimental results reveal that it is possible to train a face detector without having to label images as containing a face or not," says the team.

"We also find that the same network is sensitive to other high-level concepts such as cat faces and human bodies."

"Starting with these learned features, we trained our network to obtain 15.8 percent accuracy in recognising 20,000 object categories from ImageNet, a leap of 70 percent relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art," it said, a newspaper reports.

The 'brain' was a creation of the company's 'blue sky ideas' lab, Google X, reportedly located in Google's Mountain View, California, headquarters - known as 'the Googleplex'.

Engineers are free to work on projects such as connected fridges that order groceries when they run low - or even tableware that can connect to social networks. Other Google engineers have reportedly researched ideas as far-out as elevators to space.