Similar to SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), the search for AI (Artificial Intelligence) has now turned to distributed P2P computing.

The Artificial Intelligence System (AIS) breaks up complex tasks into small discrete jobs that can be automatically downloaded to individual PCs, processed when the PC is not being actively used, and returned back to the AIS project. AIS is part of an effort to reverse engineer the human brain and create intelligence on a computer.

Project Leader Ovidiu Anghelidi said "One of the critical issues blocking our advances in this field is computing power. The human brain has an estimated 100 billion neurons. Simulating biophysical neural networks of this magnitude requires computing resources that few organizations have. By employing a large network of computers, we can overcome this problem. We ask the public at large to volunteer for this task and donate computer time, which will allow us to build a large scale AI System. Our research findings will allow us to move to the development phase and start building a system that will scale beyond the human brain capacity."

"Our final goal is to have a system that integrates knowledge from many disciplines, like mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Building such a system will have exceptional benefits for our society, mainly because it will accelerate scientific discovery across all fields. The computer revolution brought about unprecedented changes in our society and AI should be no different in this regard."