A brain belonging to any intelligent animal (excluding humans), or the newest supercomputers (like Watson from IBM)? You can pick either option for any reason really, even if it's something silly like you just really like dogs and don't like IBM. If you picked the computer, would you consider a human brain to be more impressive?
Even a rat or bird brain is far more impressive than the worlds most powerful computer. Probably even bug brain but I'm not so sure about that any more, still it's more compact. Today's computers aren't that impressive at all. They're still based on the same technology from the 60s but they're just more polished now and smaller with some minor architectural improvements.
Computers are only "smarter" as data storage or calculating large numbers. Organic brains just work differently.
I find both impressive in different ways. Computers as a feat of engineering and research, brains for their complexity as something that has evolved over millions of years.
Last edited by mmocfcbe462c17; 2012-02-15 at 06:59 AM.
Reason: weird typo, need caffeine...
Animal brains will always be more impressive. Computers can't do more then what the designers intended, whilst animals are always surprising us, even decades after we thought we have figured them out.
I find both impressive in their own way. Since computers do what they're programmed to, it'll still be able to be quite intelligent, just depends who computed it.
But then again, if an animal actually develops high intelligence on it's own, that is extremely impressive as well.