Scientists Create a ''Schizophrenic'' Computer
Fake brains used to study real brains.
Despite all the major advancements in our information age, the world's most complex supercomputer is still the human brain. We may not have tri-gate 3D transistors or the ability to parse information like Watson, but our brains work in ways that computers simply can't. Of course, that could just be because science isn't there yet.
Scientists are making a headway though, as researchers at Yale and the University of Texas are afflicting computers with symptoms of schizophrenia in an effort to better the understanding of the human mind.
One theory about schizophrenia is that the brain loses the ability to forget or ignore information that's largely irrelevant. Without this filter, the brain is unable to extract meaningfulness out of experiences. Scientists are using this hypothesis in its computer model called DISCERN which could mimic schizophrenia.
"The hypothesis is that dopamine encodes the importance-the salience-of experience," says Uli Grasemann, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. "When there's too much dopamine, it leads to exaggerated salience, and the brain ends up learning from things that it shouldn't be learning from."
"It's an important mechanism to be able to ignore things," says Grasemann. "What we found is that if you crank up the learning rate in DISCERN high enough, it produces language abnormalities that suggest schizophrenia."
"Information processing in neural networks tends to be like information processing in the human brain in many ways," says Grasemann. "So the hope was that it would also break down in similar ways. And it did."
Their results were published in April in Biological Psychiatry. Read more from UTexas.

"The Greatest Scientists in the world came together to create the worlds dumbest computer."
Or in this case, craziest computer.
I don't browse through "100's of websites every day", yet I came across this article weeks ago (from somewhere). It's pretty funny how often Tom's Hardware is behind the times.
Well, now you have an impotent computer. Well done!
Sorry, but schizophrenia is not mental retardation, nor stupidity. Bad analogy.
What they actually did was build a computer model that's loosely inspired by a human brain, then were able to observe similar symptoms after changing factors thought to cause the disorder in actual brains.
This is an interesting story, but it's mostly a story about computer modeling and not really about AI.
Sorry guys, but your comments about Skynet and HAL are way off base.
Its pretty funny how idiots like you post usless crap like this on a post to get attention. Also how for some reason you missed this being posted on toms a week ago. This is the second time i seen this posted here. Why not say something else moronic like does it play crysis ffs.