Together, PS3s can be very brainy

Students from UC Irvine and Dartmouth college have netted themselves the $10,000 prize at IBM's Cell Broadband Engine Professor University Challenge on September 24. By connecting three PlayStation 3s together the team have emulated functions of the human brain - specifically, visual recognition algorithms. While other gaming platforms had substantial lag when performing visual recognition tasks, the PS3 lowered that to only a second of thinking time in order to recognise an object.

This marks only the beginning of the group's research into utilising artificial brain algorithms for use in robots, cars and other machines. Recreating the human brain, curing cancer - what can't the PS3 do? Maybe one day it'll even have some games to play. We kid, we kid ...

[Via Digg]