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Machines That Emulate The Human Brain

Posted by Hemos on from the or-mammal-brains-in-general dept.

prostoalex writes "Discover magazine provides an interesting insight into the future technologies that will emulate the human brain. While artificial intelligence supporters always considered direct emulation of brain functions too complex and preferred the top-down approach, some people are researching the ways human brain processes data. One of the interesting discoveries, mentioned in the article, is ability of the brain to re-architect the links as new information is added."

4 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. how do we get them drunk? by spike666 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    if we want to analyse how alcohol impairs our thinking, how do we get these things drunk?

  2. The question is of course ... by watzinaneihm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What would the machine do if it were intelligent enough? Men/women atleast would do things that make 'em happy. What can a machine be happy about?
    Also if this rewiring theory is true, we could just put in nano-radios into the head of a zillion bees and put in a nice enough routing algorithm then the bee colony would be an intelligent being ,right? ( assuming that a bee's brains are equivalent to a small cluster of human brain ?) . Now would the bees still look for honey more itelligently? or would they find the grand unified theory?

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    .ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
  3. Idly thinking... by Hubert_Shrump · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is there an inverse Turing test?

    Maybe we can make machines that fail it.

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    Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
  4. Re:There's no ghost in the machine... by CodeShark · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Bad grammar/wording on my part. Try it this way:

    Even if we could replicate the sheer processing power of the human brain at similar power levels, and make it mobile, our current circuitry and programming paradigms still don't offer a technologic basis for the kind of split second decisions..." followed by the remainder of my post.

    BTW, I am very aware of neural networks, and even some chip technologies based on modeling neurons. But there's nothing in the silicon that implicitly decides which particular version of a neuronal circuit might be useful, and what weird alternate connections it should make. Nor how to implicitly attempt to self-heal around a known bad connection, etc. like the biologic based computer does. All of that has to be developed fairly explicitly by an intelligent entity, also known as the human brain.

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    ...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...