Just a Brain in a vat

[AChimp]

Monitoring the pulses from individual neurons would be an impossible feat, so they are only monitoring general electrical activity in 60 spots. That gives you 60! combinations (if I remember my math correctly) for input and output.

They've been talking about doing stuff like this for a long time in AI. Current computers can only compute things sequentially while our brains do millions of things in parallel. This is why it is currently impossible to have a modern computer solve an NP hard problem; it would take centuries to arrive at a solution.

This "brain" isn't thinking, in the traditional sense of the word, but it is able to do a lot more things than a computer can. The only drawback is that you would have to teach each brain as opposed to a computer program that could be saved and moved around to different machines.