12/07/09 — Taking inspiration from genetic screening techniques, researchers from MIT and Harvard have harnessed the processing power of dozens of high-performance NVIDIA graphics cards and PlayStation 3s gaming devices to create a high-throughput screening process that teases out the best parameters for visual object recognition tasks. The neural processing involved in visually recognizing even the simplest object in a natural environment is profound---and profoundly difficult to mimic. Neuroscientists have made broad advances in understanding the visual system, but much of the inner workings of biologically-based systems remain a mystery. Using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs)—the same technology video game designers use to…