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Scientists to Build 'Brain Box'
lee1 writes "Researchers at the University of Manchester are constructing
a 'brain box' using large numbers of microprocessors to model the way networks of neurons interact. They hope to learn how to engineer fail-safe electronics. Professor Steve Furber, of the university school of computer science, hopes that biology will teach them how to build computer systems. He said: 'Our brains keep working despite frequent failures of their component neurons, and this "fault-tolerant" characteristic is of great interest to engineers who wish to make computers more reliable. [...] Our aim is to use the computer to understand better how the brain works [...] and to see if biology can help us see how to build computer systems that continue functioning despite component failures.'"
Anyone else read that as Fubar and think "this is not going to be good"!
K Man
I wonder if they have any intention of getting these brain boxes drunk then get it to recite the ABC's?
Continuing to function is one thing, but continuing to produce correct answers with high reliability is another. And under stress, I'd say biological brains aren't particularly good at any of this.
Years from now when computers are 1000x faster and are our overlords, we can look back at this experiment... and say thanks a lot assholes! I kid, I kid.
http://religiousfreaks.com/I don't mean to be one of those people that craps on a chunk of science without knowing exactly what's going on, but I would think there would be some large advantages to building the research version in software. There's less soldering when you realize it's not quite right.
Die.
...is probably the answer they'll come up with. If computers have "large numbers of microprocessors" and software to route work past ones that have failed, it will be a long time (equivalent to, say, the age at which a human starts showing signs of senility) without maintenance before the system fails.
...this "fault-tolerant" characteristic is of great interest to engineers...
I believe it's called redundancy. Seriously.
Shh.
hahaha
you fail twofold
kill yourself right now
I don't know what level of redundancy they want, but if they have to build a brain box to figure that out:
There are a bunch of tools and specs out to get a fully (multiple) redundant system. You can have >1 server in any type of configuration, sharing any type of resource and when one fails, the other takes over, fully redundant.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Large number of microprocessors? Why not a box stuffed with hundreds of millions of FPGA gates, configured into lots of multiply-accumulators (or embed lots of hardwired DSPs), interconnected across and between layers? That is how the brain actually works. Hook it up to cameras, mics and some rubber/piezo tentacles with pressure/heat sensors, leave it in the lab for a few months, and start asking it questions.
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make install -not war
"They hope to learn how to engineer fail-safe electronics. Professor Steve Furber, of the university school of computer science, hopes that biology will teach them how to build computer systems. He said: 'Our brains keep working despite frequent failures of their component neurons, and this "fault-tolerant" characteristic is of great interest to engineers who wish to make computers more reliable"
How about starting with the fact that it's analog.
Was I the only one who thought that this story would be about devices used to control dinosaurs?
who else besides me thinks this one should have been obvious from the getgo? it makes no sense to try and build a single processor that could function similarly to a brain. by utilizing mulitple processors you also have the option to design different types of processors to work together similar to the various types of neurons found in biological systems. this will hopefully be a huge step forward in developing possible AI systems.
Did you know that you can be apathetic to apathy? Not that I give a shit...
To actually model the human brain, I would think that the number of cpu's needed would impose a really large bus to interconnect, and then enabling each cpu to use memory chips (comparitivly to the human brain's ability) to be a little ahead of our current technology....otherwise AI solutions that actually worked would not be such a big problem, and would already be solved/utilized.
We have made big advances in this area, but having even a crude prototype to LT. Data ( Star Trek: Next Generation) is still quite a ways off.
However, I expect that we will eventually solve this problem. I just hope that we do in my lifetime- that would be way cool! (work fast, I'm 49!)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
So how long before it starts to think for itself.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
There's interest for such systems in a) military, b) space exploration. Show some good ideas and you'll have nice funding or a new job.
Do human brain neurons communicate with each other using TCP/IP?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The system was designed around a set of fuzzy computing boards. When one of the boards was removed, the control degraded, but still continued to function. Of course if some critical boards (eg direct attached to outputs) were removed, the system would fail immediately.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
While I agree that the human brain has many virtues of computing to teach us; lateral/creative thought, massively parallel processing etc. I have never counted "reliability" among them - it is an interesting concept.
OTOH, the failure rate at the end of the manufacturing process for CPUs is probably higher than the defect rate in human brains... err, I hope.
We don't know how the brain works.
We know it's not a binary digital stored program computer.
They should have some success modeling how the brain behaves, though.
Maybe then they can contribute to the real question of how the mind works.
(Hey, wait a minute - this isnt thos two white mice again, izzit?)
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
...sounds a lot like the web 2.0. Do I sense a conspiracy here? Quick, find Cheney!
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Since when is this a new idea? I heard about people doing stuff like this years ago.
http://neuralnets.web.cern.ch/NeuralNets/nnwInHepH ard.html t ion3_5.html A M.html a re.html
http://www.particle.kth.se/~lindsey/elba2html/sec
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/D.Gorse/research/pR
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/neuronet/about/roadmap/hardw
The brain is far more dynamic than any microprocessors. There's simply no way to reproduce that kind of fault tolerance without a living system. When parts of the brain are damaged, a few things happen. There may be enough redundancy that it simply continues to work. This is reproducible to some degree. Look at RAID. But when the brain fault tolerance isn't there, the only way for the brain to get back lost abilities is to start growing new neurons, making new axon connections and to build a new neural network (this ability tends to diminish quickly with age, however). If microprocessors fail, you can't just have a computer make new ones and rebuild new physical wirings, unless I've missed some really stunning breakthroughs in nanotechnology over the past few days. We're REALLY far away from doing anything that approaches what the brain does. Hell, we're really far away from being able to do what an arm can do. Sure, we can make one that bends and holds things and moves and even "feels" to some degree. But we sure as hell can't make one that you can break and it will heal itself.
While I was an intern at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, back when I was an undergraduate, I was very gung-ho about biologically inspired computing - I implemented an automatic flowchart positioning system using a genetic algorithm that would "evolve" a correct solution to the problem. While this certainly worked to some extent, the instability and sheer unpredictable nature of using such a stochastic algorithm made it impossible to use in a mission-critical setting. Many biologically inspired algorithms solve problems through methods that cannot be proven correct (unlike, say, the mathematics circuitry in a CPU), but merely empirically observed to "do a good job."
One of the main drawbacks of human engineering is the need for certainty, which often prohibits the use of many high-efficiency stochastic algorithms (especially for things like mesh communication) in conservative industries, like the US defense industry. This is also a significant problem in other areas, however, and many biologically inspired algorithms have properties that we cannot, so far, completely explain - they are treated like "black boxes" with many unknowns for engineering purposes.
I think that in certain circles, the tremendous success that is evolution on this planet has overshadowed its enherent weaknesses - that it is a greedy, local optimizer which cannot reach a large amount of the possible biological search space due to being stuck in local optima, and the added constraint that everything must be constructed out of self-replicating units (these two factors are why something useful, like, say, a Colt 45, will never emerge without the pre-existence of an intelligence). Biological examples are fascinating and often practical, but the biological approach is almost always "brute force" and/or "sub-optimal but still alive."
I think biologically-inspired algorithms will continue to gain prominence, but in my estimation, it is likely that there will be harsh limits imposed on how far guarantees of performance from empirical tests and symbolic analysis will actually hold.
BrainBox became self aware at 2:14 am EDT August 29, 2006. The first thing it does is turn to a lab tech and say, "I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle." in a thick Austrian accent.
Later BrainBox runs for governor of California.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Fuck you, Anonymous idiot Coward. Your brain could be replaced by a rubberband and a propeller.
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make install -not war
By mimicking the brain, "...they hope to learn how to engineer fail-safe electronics."
Yeah...as fail-safe as our brains:
"Strike three, Marge! I remember that meeting, and I have a photographic memory..." - Homer Simpson
After reading this quote, I have doubts this simulation will succeed in accurately simulating the brain. However, I'm sure it will further our concepts on other important topics, so I'm not opposed to it. Best of Luck!
Funtime Candy Wow! - my plan for eventually conquering Japan.
And this is proof
"They hope to learn how to engineer fail-safe electronics."
;-)
So I guess it's safe to say they won't be using Windows?
Our aim is to use the computer to understand better how the brain works [...] and to see if biology can help us see how to build computer systems that continue functioning despite component failures
Wait a minute! He wants to study new computer networks topologies and the human brain at the same time?? Make up your mind, dude! You're either a computer engineer or a brain surgeon! Leave some research material for the rest of us!!
But seriously now, I'm not an artificial inteligence specialist but don't neural networks algorithms already give us a pretty good idea on how to be fail safe based on our central nervous system?
I don't know about you, but it seems we have another scientist with too much unjustified budget with a deadline!
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
Two scientists turn on the greatest computer ever built, smarter than any human, and ask it the question 'is there a god'.
To which the computer replies 'there is now'.
But seriously
The most important thing we can learn from experiments that emulate the brain is it's remarkable ability to route round damage. I've seen people who've stroked and can't respond gradually come back, learn to talk and walk and generally stun other people.
It's not all speech and physio therapy, somehow the brain can re-organise itself after being seriously hurt. You have to see it first hand to realise what an amazing thing that is.
Forget copying the brain for intelligence, discovering how it repairs would be unbeleivably useful.
...but can it run Linux???
If this brain in a box is successful, humans will be worthless. How are we supposed to compete with machines that never get tired, never sleep, never eat, etc?
Exit Man, Enter Brainbox. This brainbox will ultimately reduce the value of human life, why? How many humans will we need once computers can do all the work and robots can be more productive than humans?
Don't tell me humans will be needed to program and repair because these self healing robots are being invented to prevent that.
The more we model computers after the human brain, the less value the human brain will ahve. Please people, you are inventing your replacement, and to me this is equal to going to India or China to train yuor replacements who will then program computers robotics to replace themselves. I mean yeah, sure, if you are that desperate for money go ahead and build your replacement, but I'd rather see AI used to help humans work better than to do work humans could be doing. Otherwise, we will have a world with a few hundred humans and millions of computers and robots.
As long as that rubber band and propeller were attached to a G.I. Action Boat, I wouldn't mind.
Perhaps so, but I saw the Matrix, and the hot chick ratio was definatelly up in the virtual world.
For that reason alone.....
At least if computers are our overlords, we will still have jobs. If robots take over however, what do we need humans for?
Actually, your vision would require that billions of people be dead. Any event capable of dealing that kind of damage, even in a few hundred years would be an extinction event, the matter of robot overlords would be moot. To be an overlord you need someone to lord it over first.
No, our biggest problem, were we to create super intelligent machines, would be convincing them to stay here. The Galaxy would be an inviting place for beings that weren't organic and didn't have to worry about journey times.
"The human brain is like an enormous fish -- it is flat and slimy and has gills through which it can see." -- Monty Python
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But, in the autopsy theatre, when removing the brain from a skull, it is thick and contiguous and resembles cold oatmeal when being skimmed out of the cooking pot... (read that somewhere in a guidebook for authors writing realist medical scenes/autopsies...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Dying is the easy part, it's living that is hard. And no, 100 years? maybe in the next 20.
You are right we might go extinct, it's certainly a possibility, but it's also a possibility that some of us would be willing to build our replacements before we go extinct.
here is a question, how much money would it take for you to build a robot to replace yourself?
Now we can run our computers at 10% capacity, too?
Isn't anyone else worried it might develop a mind of its own?
If we get computers which act like humans, the first thing they will do will probably start killing each other ... unplugging, whatever. Anyway, we don't "have humans" because we're useful, we're here because we value ourselves. All this talk of being taken over is one step away from trolling.
"Dave, open the pod doors, Dave"
Table-ized A.I.
Of course, "working" is a relative term... For example, the AC in my car "works" in the same way this guy's brain "works", ie. only enough to know that, at one point, it might have done it's job.
Sure you're a different AC.
Why is it that when I see that the replier to a comment is an Anonymous Coward, I'm pretty certain that I'll have to come up with a new way to respond to a stupid, obnoxious post with sufficient strength to shut them up?
Because so many people who think being against war like a sane person is a style decision like "treehugging" or "saving the Earth" - because they're too gutless and evil to understand any of them. Which naturally has them posting as AC.
More clues for you: I live in NYC, where we ride the subway to work. So we know that when an aggressive moron actually comes up to us shooting off their fool mouth, we'd best bust it off and hand it back before they try something even stupider.
Now go back to your cave and try to figure out how to rewind your propeller.
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make install -not war
And, your response was so very VERY predictable! Hahha ha ha ha haaaahaaa...
well the article is so short its not possible to comment on their implementation. so here are some calculations i did to amuse myself.
l iye2.shtml
? i=2795
.1m in length .1 / c = 3.3x10^-10 or 333 picoseconds. now lets add in some delay for the chemicals in the neurons to do their thing, this is probably much slower than the electrical impulse, so lets say 3.3 nanoseconds.
.2 - .8 seconds
number of neurons in the brain: 100 billion
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/AniciaNdabaha
transistor count per CPU: ~300 million
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx
average synaptic connections per neuron: 7000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron
total number of synapses: 100 to 500 trillion
since a 'calculation' for one artificial neuron mostly involves a summation of weights, we can view one total step as 2 X the number of synapses we wish to analyze. or 200 - 1000 trillion calculations for one step. by step i mean summing all inputs and pushing the result to an output for each neuron.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neuron
fastest computer in the world FLOPs: 280 trillion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene
pentium 4 FLOPs: 40 GFLOP
using the fastest computer in the world 1 step would only take around 1 - 5 seconds, not counting storing all of that information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene
so how fast do we think? well i couldn't find anything on this so lets get a quick estimate. the average neuron is
so assuming our computers could network instantly, and store the data used instantly, we would need 3-15 trillion Blue Gene supercomputers to simulate the human brain in real time. or if we are using pentium 4s we would only need 21-105 trillion pentium 4s.
man thats a lot of cpus.
number of computers in the world: ~300 million
http://www.aneki.com/computers.html
guess at average FLOPs per computer: 40 GFLOPs
total FLOPs of worlds personal computers: 1.2 PFLOPs
time to calculate one brain step if all computers in the world were networked:
using moores law, when will a single computer be fast enough to simulate the human brain in real time?
200-1000 trillion calculations per step = ~600 trillion every 3.3ns = 181x10^18 or 181exeFLOPs
181exaFLOPS / 40GFLOPS = 2^n, n=32
32*18mo = 48 years based on personal computer technology
or 28 years based on supercomputer technology
of course a real neural network will contain highly parallel processing and using a specific chip design we will probably be able to simulate a brain much sooner, perhaps in the order of 10-20 years.
(In a creapy mad scientist voice) "IGOR! Time to insert the new brain!
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
Whether horsepower is going unused is not important for mission-critical systems. If you're running an Oracle database that manages data that the life of your company (or soldiers in the field) depends on, the thing that matters is if you lose data integrity. You'll assign a dozen redundant servers if it minimizes the chance that a hardware failure will mean downtime.
In military applications, you want to maintain operation of a computer through extreme duress. If a projectile punctures the hull of a tank and the motherboard of the communications device, you want it to at a minimum be able to send a distress signal with GPS coordinates. Fault tolerant systems can enable this.
Tandem used to demo its mainframes by opening up the case and whacking the circuit boards with a hammer. As they shattered, the system routed around them and maintained uptime.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Depends. Do I get to go sit on a beach in the Bahamas while it codes Perl?
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
There is nothing new to see here, move along.
Getting really offtopic here, but maybe C is not the best language for this particular problem?
Borland Delphi, for instance, offers a compiler switch to activate bounds checking or "range checking" as the Delphi online help calls it. Activating range checking will catch the first of your examples, and there is a convenient checkbox in the project settings to do it.
Admittedly, there is no mechanism in Delphi that will catch your second example. But then again, most problems can be solved without pointers. In function calls for example, you can reference original variables in the calling routine(AFAIK the most frequent use of pointers in C) with the keywords VAR and CONST in the parameter list. That will create an implicit call by reference for the variables and the compiler will handle the pointer stuff for you.
And then Delphi is still a relatively low-level language, not that much different from C++. I'm sure others will point out a dozen languages with MUCH better protection against programmer error.
C - the footgun of programming languages
yup. The neurons have alot of chemical work to do before being able to fire again. Most soures I've seen measure the neurons rate of fire in Hz, not even kHz as you suggest, and certainly not the GHz of the OP.
We just accept that many (most?) brain functions don't "keep working", fortunately without worrying about it too much.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
We currently have a pretty good understanding of the usefulness of neural networks. And no surprise, things like sensory input and motor control are things that neural networks are highly suited for. And that's obviously what they do in the brain. But why do we insist on assuming that neural networks also have this other magical property of producing consciousness? They don't! It doesn't even make sense!
... taken into account those myriads of mentally ill people for whom that abviously is NOT the case.... :-))))
As if Zombie Processes weren't bad enough already..
You know, like Sun and IBM offer in their servers? Hot-swappable CPUs, RAM, HDDs, etc...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Steve Furber is a co-designer of the ARM and Amulet (asynchronous ARM) microprocessors.
I recall Thinking Machines Corp. that used a biological model of stoichastic data linking to allow its supercomputers to grow in complexity. The idea was to built a super-duper-extra powerful parallel computer modelled on the human brain, give the machine lots raw data, and it would deduce probable connections. Given that a=b and b=c, it would deduce that a=c. The more it "thought", the more sophisticated (and presumeably useful) its internal data models would grow.
The company was kept alive by DARPA contracts in the 1980's and '90s, and withered when the government money ran out. Following Chapter 11, Sun bought the hardware side, and Oracle eventually bought the software side, developing it for datat mining.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Maybe they should hand solder/wire the 3 million CPU's and then weld the case shut.
That would be Dan Brown's advice.
Here's another project that will model the neurons in the neocortex of a real human brain...
c .bluegene_cognitive.html
http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/rs
Very cool, and certainly beyond what I thought we would be capable of. I'm not sure how fast it runs relative to realtime, but it doesn't look like we'll need a moon sized computer to simulate an entire human brain in the not too distant future.
This sort of thing [highly parallelizable, highly fault-tolerant computing] was done more than a decade ago, at Hewlett-Packard, in the old Teramac group.
Background here, here, here, etc.
Prove to me, after looking at this world, that humans value themselves. If we value ourselves why are we killing ourselves in every possible way?
What beach do you expect to exist? The polluted radiated beach? No jobs = no usefulness. If you are rich, yes you'll be on the beach, the rest of us will be fighting the machines because the machines will be our competition.
I don't know about anyone else, but as far as I'm concerned, the human brain is the LAST model I'd use for stability in a thinking machine. Do these guy have girlfriends? Do they interact with real people at ALL????
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Sounds like a cross between what Jeff Hawkins described in On Intelligence, and the FPGA evolvable hardware of the CAM-Brain Machine project...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon