Google network spots cats

network of 16 000 computer processors as an experiment designed to emulate the powers of the human brain, NPR reports.

Turned loose for three days on 10 million YouTube clips, and this brain did what any of our brains would do: It learnt how to recognise a cat.

This adds to a growing body of research on artificial intelligence. The company is set to present the research at the International Conference on Machine Learning, in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The team built a neural network, which mimics the working of a biological brain, which worked out how to spot pictures of cats in just three days, BBC notes.

The cat-spotting computer was created as part of a larger project to investigate machine learning.

GMA News writes that Google's research represents a new generation of computer science exploiting the falling cost of computing and the availability of huge clusters of computers in giant data centres.

This is leading to significant advances in areas such as machine vision and perception, speech recognition and language translation.