Revolutionary computers are on the way. Now we just need to know how to program them

A team of Stanford scientists has created a circuit board, dubbed “NeuroGrid,” consisting of 16 computing cores that simulate more than 1 million neurons and billion of synapses. They think it could be mass produced for about $400 per board, meaning it would be economically feasible to embed the boards into everything from robots to artificial limbs in order to speed up their computing cycles while significantly reducing their power consumption.

But even if that’s possible, there would still be one big problem: Right now, NeuroGrid requires, essentially, a neuroscientist in order to program it.

It’s arguably a bigger problem than the cost of production (although the $40,000 price tag for the prototype version would be very prohibitive), because processor architectures are nothing without people to build applications for them. We’re already used to processors and microchips embedded in many of the things we use, but most are slow, weak and power-hungry compared to…