Supercomputer Simulates Human Visual System

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?"

Comments

The Last Step For Ubiquitous Robotics?

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

Visual object recognition systems have been a thorn in the side of robotics since the beginning. The other annoynace of battery power will likely be solved by the nanowire battery - therefore leaving 'sight' as the real final technological step for our lovely robots.

Extrapolating further, a human-quality object recognition system will yield results which we cannot currently imagine (let's avoid some big-brother robot talk for a second, however).

For example; I was looking at some old WWII photographs of troops getting on boat - thousands of faces in these very high-quality photographs. To myself, I thought,'Self. If all historical photographs could be placed in view of a recognition system, perhaps it could be found, interestingly, where certain ancestors of ours did appear.'

Throw in a dash of human-style creativity and reasoning and I'm certain some truly nifty revelations are to be found in our mountains of visual documentation currently lamenting in countless vast archives.

Re:New goal...

[spun]

Something like a Mantis Shrimp? Some species can detect circularly polarized light; each stalk mounted eye, on its own, has trinocular vision; they have up to sixteen different types of photoreceptors (not counting the many separate color filters they also have) to our four; and the information is transmitted from the retina in parallel, not serially down a single optic nerve like ours.

These are also the little dudes who can strike with the force of a .22 caliber bullet, fast enough to cause cavitation and sonoluminescence.

Go Super Shrimp!