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An attempt to emulate a brain on a network of computers.

There's a company called Artificial Development who are trying to simulate a 20 billion neuron brain. They call it CCortex.

http://www.ad.com/

They've been at it for several years so looks like IBM are a bit behind.

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HTH

>>A red flag is the lack of any scientific papers available from the Numenta web site.

Not really. It's a private company, the only type of publications you'll get from them are patents. Same problem with all the rest, by the way, the Cyc project and Artifical Development are also very, very quiet.
These seems to be the time for corporations to give it a try, not just researchers, and in a corporation if it's not a patent it is a trade secret :)

There are actually quite a few projects now taking similar, cortex-centric approaches to AI hard problems. Are we up to something here? The guys responsible of these projects are not wacko types at all, but established entrepreneurs and/or well-known researchers:

CCortex "A 20-billion neuron simulation of the Human Cortex and peripheral systems."
Cyc a knowledge base with vast collection of facts about the real world and logical reasoning ability. Financed by Paul Allen AI related investment company,Vulcan.
Numenta is developing a new type of computer memory system modeled after the human neocortex.

They seem to we well financed, and knowledgeable. Are we witnessing the start of something big here?

Artificial Development is developing a simulation of the human cortex. They could use this thing. They need all the processing power they can get their hands on.

Nonsense, we are getting there. According to most observers it may take just a few more Moore years to get it done. In fact, this company may already have a Proto-AI.

Artificial Development, Inc. today announced that it has completed assembly of the first functional portion of a prototype of CCortex(TM), a 20-billion neuron emulation of the human cortex, which it will use to build a next-generation artificial intelligence system. Artificial Development will initiate testing of CCortex in October

The cluster being assembled at AD.com Data Center is a high-performance, parallel supercomputer, composed of 500 nodes and one thousand processors, 1.5 terabytes of RAM, and 80 terabytes of storage.

The low-cost software/hardware system runs on Linux, Intel and AMD processors. When all sections are assembled, CCortex is expected to reach a theoretical peak performance of 4,800 Gflops, making it one of the top 20 fastest computers in the world. The cluster will be used as a test bed for beta versions of CCortex.

CCortex is a massive spiking neuron network emulation and will mimic the human cortex, the outer layer of gray matter at the cerebral hemispheres, largely responsible for higher brain functions. The emulation covers up to 20 billion layered neurons and 2 trillion 8-bit connections.