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Microchip Mimics a Brain With 200,000 Neurons
Al writes "European researchers have taken a step towards replicating the functioning of the brain in silicon, creating new custom chip with the equivalent of 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections. The aim of the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States (FACETS) project is to better understand how to construct massively parallel computer systems modeled on a biological brain. Unlike IBM's Blue Brain project, which involves modeling a brain in software, this approach makes it much easier to create a truly parallel computing system. The set-up also features a distributed algorithm that introduces an element of plasticity, allowing the circuit to learn and adapt. The researchers plan to connect thousands of chips to create a circuit with a billion neurons and 10^13 synapses (about a tenth of the complexity of the human brain)."
I really, really hope they follow the laws of robotics with any sort of "learning and adaptation" behavior.
This is nothing more than throwing more hardware at an existing problem. This has been emulated in software before, with nothing much to show for it. This will make it easier to model such things, but multiplying almost nothing by many, many times is still very little.
The problem is that deep down, most people believe that killing off the humans would be the intelligent decision.
Frankly, I'd rather have the more intelligent beings in charge.
Not if we're competing for resources... I'd hate to be the spotted owl :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Paraphrasing a book (forget the name), if you took a dog and made its brain 1000 times faster, all you'd get is a dog that needs 1/1000th of the time to decide whether to sniff your crotch.
Thinking faster would certainly be very useful, but it may not necessarily mean that the output will be of a higher quality.
If robots are ever more intelligent than us, they'll also be intelligent enough to make good decisions.
Two points to bring up.
Point the first. Intelligence does not equal good will. Don't make me Godwin this thread.
Point the second. Good decisions...for whom? Us or them? Your robots may have different notions than you have.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
If you consider complexity of the universe to be a good thing and a dull, uniform universe to be a bad thing, then humanity has done its share to make the universe better. Of course, "good" is subjective, but you probably already knew that before asking.
Member of the 7 Digit UID Club
I didn't read the featured article, but whenever I see "X program/system mimics brain" I always try to pipe in with my 2 cents.
Any system that considers a brain as nothing but a series of perceptron-based connections is going to fall short of the neurology of the actual brain it is trying to mimic. Ask any neurologist and they will tell you that there many other dimensions at play in the human brain. For instance, the whole system itself is sitting in a chemical bath which can change at any moment with the right mixture of hormones or other chemical changes. These changes in chemistry affect the firing and working of the neurons, axons, and synapses. Combine this with the control of external factors such as DNA, RNA, and epigenitics and things start getting exponentially complex.
I don't mean to down-play the progress we're making in this field. I just hate it when I see the "Computer system with X-sized neural network must equal a brain with X-number of neurons" mentality.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
It starts, yes, but in the most inefficient way possible.
IBM's approach is the much better one, imho. Emulating wetware won't get us very far, except to clone a wetware brain. Since we haven't yet worked out the proper, safe, reliable, healthy way to raise our children, creating a human brain clone with potentially much more intelligence and almost certainly all the same flaws is not a good thing.
If IBM are working on a higher-level, trying to build a system where we can see the associations in terms of "A frequently_sees B" "B helps A" and "A respects B" therefore "A likes B" is much more useful. With that kind of high-level emulation, we can actually see how things are working, tweak them, customise them, extract datasets, etc. We could programmatically have one of these brains loading a scenario, fast-forwarding to evaluate all known possible events and outcomes, and predicting the future, since it would essentially be doing that on a smaller scale anyway, to make decisions. We could do this with the neuron-based wetware emulation too, but only really if we asked it to, and it wanted to comply.
When we can reliably read and control a simulation of a human wetware, we'll be a few days from reading and controlling a real human wetware brain, so I'd much rather see the alternate scenario play out.
Still, if it has a tenth of the complexity of the human brain, it's already pretty close, given how processing power grows exponentially.
Also, your simulation analogy is fallacious. The essence of the brain is not the fact that it exists as a physical object, but the fact that it can manipulate information. If we simulate a brain such that the simulation does not physically pump chemicals around, it will still be fine as long as it processes information in the same way.
Member of the 7 Digit UID Club
What has always baffled me about the whole singularity is the whole "fuzzy" definition of the whole thing. Generation n produces a "better" Generation n+1 which produces a better Generation n+2, etc. etc. Sometimes this is defined as "more intelligent". Yet, no real definition of "better" or "more intelligent" is ever given. At some point, an end goal must be defined. What if at generation 10, the machine realized there really is no point to anything. It becomes nihilistic and without millions of years of survival instinct in its genes, decides there is no point to existence and carries through with the logical conclusion?
If there is no concrete goal, then the whole singularity collapses on itself.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year