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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."

6 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. Top down vs. Bottom up by Fly · · Score: 4, Insightful
    This article talks to people who are doing mostly or solely bottom-up work to emulate brain activities, and poo-poos the work that has been done on top-down approaches. While I don't think anyone can refute the need to do low-level bottom-up reverse-engineering to understand how our brains work, I agree with Hofstadter, et al. in _Fluid_Concepts_&_Creative_Analogies_ that there needs to be a fundamental change in the direction of top-down approaches.

    I am intrigued by his work in combining the top-down and bottom-up work with his "codelets" design which relies on probabalistic results from a bottom-up approach that are weighted and driven in a more top-down manner. This higher-level approach is meant to simulate "mind" rather than "brain", but I'm eager to see just how far towards "mind" the neural approach in the article can be taken.

    [youmaynotcare]It's cool to see McCormick in an AI article. My first course from him was AI, and it fascinated me.[/youmaynotcare]

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  5. A better idea... by budalite · · Score: 3, Funny

    Geez, surely we can do better! Most of the ones currently in production seem to be defective!!
    (Get me that guy that figured out what was wrong with HAL...)

  6. Oh great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    First it was the H-1B's taking our jobs, and now artificial brains. I should've been a dancer.