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Supercomputer Simulates Human Visual System

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-can-see-clearly-now dept.

An anonymous reader writes "What cool things can be done with the 100,000+ cores of the first petaflop supercomputer, the Roadrunner, that were impossible to do before? Because our brain is massively parallel, with a relatively small amount of communication over long distances, and is made of unreliable, imprecise components, it's quite easy to simulate large chunks of it on supercomputers. The Roadrunner has been up only for about a week, and researchers from Los Alamos National Lab are already reporting inaugural simulations of the human visual system, aiming to produce a machine that can see and interpret as well as a human. After examining the results, the researchers 'believe they can study in real time the entire human visual cortex.' How long until we can simulate the entire brain?"

4 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. New goal... by dahitokiri · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Perhaps the goal should be to make the visual system BETTER than ours?

    1. Re:New goal... by CodeBuster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You do realize that such an ocular system, which undoubtedly works well for the limited needs of the shrimp, may have accompanying disadvantages for complex land based life forms such as humans. The human vision system while not optimized for certain specialized uses, such as the aforementioned shrimp, is never the less a very decent general purpose system that has served our species well for eons. It is likely that our current system of vision, especially when compared to the possible trade-offs for increased capabilities (less general intelligence capabilities as more of the brain and nervous system is devoted to complex autonomous image processing for example), is fairly close to optimal given the other constraints of our bodies. Besides, for those situations where a particular aptitude is useful but not always desirable, night vision for example, human intelligence has allowed us to construct external enhancement devices that we can turn on or off at will. Animals which have developed night vision naturally as part of a nocturnal lifestyle cannot turn that feature on or off at will and thus are at a disadvantage during the daytime whereas humans are more generally adaptable. It is fairly clear that innate intelligence is among the very best, if not the best, of the natural abilities that have developed under evolutionary pressure. How else to explain why humans have dominated the earth and essentially escaped the natural system that once controlled them?

  2. The Singluarity is Near by Richard.Tao · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's nice to see progress is being made. It's scary how accurate Ray Kurzwiel's predictions seem to be, he said that by early 2010 we'll have simulated a human brain. (he's a technological analyst and author of "The Singularity is Near"). Todays desktops are faster then the super computers of the 90's. I can't wait till I'm able to get a laptop smarter then me in every way (queue joke about how stupid I am), that'll be a cool time to live in. Seems it's only a matter of decades away. Probably 20 years.

    1. Re:The Singluarity is Near by 4D6963 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's nice to see progress is being made. It's scary how accurate Ray Kurzwiel's predictions seem to be, he said that by early 2010 we'll have simulated a human brain. (he's a technological analyst and author of "The Singularity is Near"). Todays desktops are faster then the super computers of the 90's. I can't wait till I'm able to get a laptop smarter then me in every way (queue joke about how stupid I am), that'll be a cool time to live in. Seems it's only a matter of decades away. Probably 20 years.

      OMG a super computer! It's so powerful it can probably pop up a consciousness of its own!

      Sarcasm aside, computer power and strong AI are two very distinct problems. Computer power is all about scaling up power so you can do more in less time, that doesn't allow you to do anything new, only the same things except faster. Strong AI is all about algorithms, and nobody can tell if such algorithms exist. And anyone who talks about human-like strong AI is a crackpot (Kurzwiel is a crackpot to me for his wacky predictions), as we have yet to see a bug-like strong AI, and if it was just a problem of power we'd already have something working in that field.

      --
      You just got troll'd!