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Mouse Brain Simulated Via Computer
Mordok-DestroyerOfWo writes "Researchers from the IBM Almaden research lab and the University of Nevada have created a simulation of half a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer. 'Half a real mouse brain is thought to have about eight million neurons each one of which can have up to 8,000 synapses, or connections, with other nerve fibres. Modelling such a system, the trio wrote, puts "tremendous constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any computing platform."' Although there's more to creating a mind than setting up the infrastructure, does this mean that we may see a system for human mental storage within our lifetimes?"
Researchers ran in terror of a big cat. News at 11.
NARF $
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
I opened my mouse and there was just a single chip in there. Why use BlueGene to simulate half of that?
and
How can it be half a mouse brain if it has 1/1000 the number of a real half mouse brain? Their simulated neurons also had less synapses than the real thing. So is the 8000 a typo, or am I missing something?
Oh no... it's the future.
Unlikely, given that we are really no where close to even understanding completely everything about our complex brains.
Do we even want to, wouldn't that take away some of the mystery behind humans. Afterall if we can figure ourselves out then doesn't that mean that we aren't really all that complex?
wouldn't that also give us perfect explanations of people's actions making situations predictable violating free will?
afterall if society is ultimately chaotic in terms of our understanding, then wouldn't this be the ultimate control?
Don't be afraid to know more. It's coming if you want it or not. It doesn't mean a thing about free will: did you ever believe that your free will belong to your "ghost" or something? You are the sum of your parts and the interaction between them. Nothing scary about this.
As for the "mental storage" - simulating a brain doesn't mean much about mental storage. Knowing and simulating an Intel chip in a program doesn't mean you can crack open an already produced Intel chip unit and hack few more cores in it.
Plus, we already make very good use of tools to expand our mental storage: starting with notes, diaries, databases, computer knowledge systems, customer relationship programs, photos albums etc. etc.
All these act as peripheral devices to our brain, and we should expect tighter integration between the brain and those (for example a wire projecting video directly in your cortex), but nothing that "expands" the brain structure at such a low level as is hinted in the summary.
If they can simulate half a mouse's brain, then they can surely simulate a politicians. Now we can start rounding up those scum and replacing them with computers ...
I wank in the shower.
For more information on the Blue Brain Project which appears to be the same, or atleast a strikingly similar project but from switzerland, click...err, that link I just placed! Here also is a good article to learn more about blue brain. It seems much more detailed than the BBC's snippit.
Groups of neurons started becoming attuned to one another until they were firing in rhythm. "It happened entirely on its own," says Markram. "Spontaneously." Insights like these are absolutly amazing. It's all such facinating research, but I can help feel a twinge of sorrow for the poor thing. the main purpose of the artificial brain, say its creators, is to make new types of experiments possible. For example, what happens when damage is inflicted on certain types of cells whose function still isn't determined? How many cells can be switched off until the behavior of the surviving cells around them becomes erratic, or the entire circuit breaks down? The poor thing is just circuits and reactions, I know, but I feel sorry that it's literally being torn apart and rebuilt all the time. It's odd, I don't feel this way in similar experiments with real mice; I guess I have a soft spot for computers...
Demented But Determined.
We used to think that the liver was responsible for anger, and the heart was responsible for love, because those are the things that seemed to react when we felt those emotions. But boy did those bafflingly complex notions fly out of the door when we discovered emotion is due to having a mass of billions of interconnected
I could go on and on and I have a very simplified laymans view of how the whole thing works.. I don't know how you can say we're starting to realize how simple we are, we're realizing how complex we are.
GM foods, by the way, haven't had their actual genomes modified, they have new genes added that create new proteins that can do things like attack insects. It's nothing as complicated as actually changing an existing gene in a useful way, which would be much more difficult because of the ways genes interact in so many ways.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
However, there is an alternate theory of consciousness, based on quantum physics. It is inherently non-deterministic and cannot be modeled in a computer.
Hence, IBM's big assumption may be wrong. However, at least, the IBM experiment will tell us whether the operation of the brain is strictly Newtonian. If this artifical brain behaves differently from a mouse brain, then we would know that non-Newtonian physics is crucial to the operation of a flesh-and-blood brain.
I would imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these, but I want to be able to sleep tonight...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Given enough late-night TV and phone-in games shows, in 25~30 years the average human should have become sufficiently simple that the contemporaneous human brain could be simulated by some shiny pebbles and lines drawn in the sand.
However, there is an alternate theory of consciousness, based on quantum physics [quantumconsciousness.org]. It is inherently non-deterministic and cannot be modeled in a computer.
I think the biggest argument against this is that synapses do not work on the atomic level. They are made of atoms, but quantum states do not seem to overtly affect organic matter at cellular level.
Of course I could be wrong about this, but since decisions are usually the next best move it could simply be a matter of weighting what the "intelligence" applies to his rules as next best move.
The problem with General Artificial Intelligence is that "the next best move" is often open ended and too many possible choices often give our current computation a run for its money unless its put into some form of predefined rules.
The reason humans do so well is because we have certain criteria encouraging us to do things (hunger, pain, altruism, fear, etc etc)
Hence, our general intelligence goals aren't that complex (usually... to feel good about oneself and one's life) and that our true intelligence is being able to recognize things that improve upon that given a set amount of rules we know.
Which makes us very deterministic.
Even rebelling against the crowd can often be very predictable in humans.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
- Simulated only half a mouse brain
- Ran at about 1/10 the speed of a real mouse brain
- Only ran for 10 seconds
- Only simulated generic tissue (didn't contain brain structures found in real mice)
From the article: Imposing such structures and getting the simulation to do useful work might be a much more difficult task than simply setting up the plumbing.For future tests the team aims to speed up the simulation, make it more neurobiologically faithful, add structures seen in real mouse brains and make the responses of neurons and synapses more detailed.
It's not that this isn't noteworthy, it's that mammalian brains are incredibly complex. I would be curious to see if they could faithfully reproduce a fish or reptile brain at this point.
So was I the only one who read "system for mental storage" as meaning the transference of a human conciousness into a computer?
That's just as unlikely. People used to computer technology know that the hardware structure and the software state are two completely different things. This is why you can build a model of the hardware, feed it the state, and bang, you have a Gameboy emulator (or whatever).
But with biology, those two are intermixed. Brain saves information by changing the connections and structure itself. This means that you can build a model of a generic human brain, run it, and you have full blown AI.
But you can't feed it the state of any human being. As every human being has different "wiring", hence won't "play" in your model.
Someone mentioned Smalltalk. Smalltalk kinda works like a brain in that regard. State is structure is state.
This is completely wrong. Gödel's theorem does not state that "any sufficiently complex system is unable to describe itself." Very roughly, it (specifically the first incompleteness theorem) states that any consistent mathematical system that is able to describe itself is necessarily incomplete. And, there is no chance that "Goedel's theorem might be proven wrong in the future." It is a theorem, a mathematical truth. Not a "theory", if that's what you are confusing it with. For more info see Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
Pfft...I can simulate half a mouse brain:
while(1){}
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Penrose is an excellent mathematician, but he's a crackpot when it comes to biology and the brain.
As for brain simulations, they almost always use randomness in the form of pseudo-random number generators. Physical random number generators are actually available and could be used, but nobody bothers because there is no conceivable way in which that could make a difference.
Well, talk about big assumptions... I did two semesters in quantum physics as part of my electronics engineering degree. There I learned a bit about this "quantum" stuff that so many people throw around so easily.
The first thing that must be understood is that quantum effects appear in *very* small dimensions only. Quantum computing experiments must be performed under extreme conditions, a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero, just to get a quantum entanglement of a few bits for a perceptible amount of time. There's no way one could obtain quantum effects beyond normal chemical reactions in a human cell.
Roger Penrose, who started this "quantum consciousness" theory is a mathematician, not a physicist. He did it probably as a response to the evolving research on neural networks, such as the one mentioned in this article, based on a philosophycal uneasiness about the idea of us having a deterministic brain. He has been debunked by quantum physicists many times since he published his book.
Yet, he needs not worry. We can have a brain that's fully deterministic at a microscopic level without doing away with free will, if we assume that our brains operate in non-linear conditions.
Besides, it's not as if we had to reproduce exactly the working of living beings to emulate them. Airplanes are able to fly higher and faster than any bird without flapping their wings. At this time, we are like aircraft engineers were in the 1890s. Perhaps we will be able to find better mechanisms than used in natural brains for processing thoughts.
Why do so many people refuse to entertain the possibility that they might be deterministic?
Well, it's not like they have a choice.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.