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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 call this microchip brain "the Pinhead" *
* small print: actual "pinheads" (microcephaly) have more brain capacity than this chip
We're all dead.
In fact, the current prototype can operate about 100,000 times faster than a real human brain. "We can simulate a day in a second," says Karlheinz.
We are SO fucking dead.
Technoli
Add a few chips and you'll soon get "I think, therefore I am."
Keep going and you'll end up with "Bite my shiny metal ass you meatbag!"
I wonder if the researchers will know when to STOP adding the together?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The first words out of it were: "They misunderestimated me."
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Oh wait. The researchers already did.
Bastards stole my thunder.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Does this mean we have completed an artificial politician brain?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
This chip sounds stupid.
I for one plan on collaborating with the Cylons.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
If the Terminator movies have taught me anything, human bones make good groundcover.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
The more I learned about computers, the more I figured that they were more like a complex engine (data or gasoline is input, its moved around, operated on by parts, and then output as results/exhaust). Maybe that's why car analogies are so popular?
But another thing to be wary of is chemical imbalances. How many brain disorders are caused by the absence of a protein or inhibitor? The chip might take several redesigns over several years to get a solid model of a properly functioning neuron. I mean, who is going to notice a schizophrenic ant or beetle, or a rat with the mental equivalent of down's syndrome? They might spend a decade building up a brain with the complexity of a human brain only to find out that its "mentally disabled". Just look at how many people have mental issues, be it emotional, learning, or developmental issues with "properly functioning" neurons but are lacking one of a hundred chemicals that make them all work together as a whole.
I'm sure that the end result of this experimentation is not a human brain, but instead a robot that can navigate ruins like a rat (downs syndrome or not) or work together like (schizophrenic or normal) ants. I'm sure they'll eventually make a financial computer that can work like a wall street broker (employed by aig or not).
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
A book is a bunch of letters: A-Za-z
Having 100.000 computerized neurons is like having a "book" made of 100.000 letters. It don't mean make any sense (=It will not compute stuff, just kind of 'exist'). But could be a interesting tech bed to try to make something like, who know? maybe the brain of a worm, or the brain a snake.
I don't know a word about the topic.
-Woof woof woof!
Can't be satisfied with machines that act as quiet servants... have to make them intelligent enough to suffer...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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.
*My* brain mimics a brain with 200,000 neurons.
No mention of the fact that it will become self-aware in 2 years and 25 days, or that two days later, the war on humanity will begin.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
It seems like these approaches are constrained in connection complexity by semiconductor fabrication, which would seem to severely limit the geometry to 2d. The article doesn't go into this, and it seems likely they put some effort into working around this with traditional approaches using buses and the like, but it does seem like you can't achieve the same degree of interconnection complexity on a thin 2d wafer as is seen in a typical 3d brain...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
Every time any story mentions them, their potential applications are reduced to the staggeringly, criminally mundane "could lead to faster computer memory". Standard von Neumann computer memory. A shame.
The brain is not a sequential Turing machine. Has any form of finite connectionism even been proven Turing-complete?
That (if I understand this story correctly) they here have been able to do what they have using components suited for our "traditional" computing architecture rather than the raw connectionist architecture of the brain is wonderful. It sounds like they're emulating synapses and plasticity/learning.
But the right memristors wouldn't be an emulation -- I'm not sure if they've actually made memristors with memristance profiles specifically for mimicking biological synapses, but THIS is their utility and the future. ... I'm not quite sure how this article tripped this indignant rant. I suppose I always figured I'd see this story using memristors first, but I guess that's just the next step.
I mean, who is going to notice a schizophrenic ant
That's the one that is walking along, waving its antennae to no one, and creeping out the other workers.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
"creating new custom chip with the equivalent of 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections."
"The researchers plan to connect several chips to create a circuit with a billion neurons and 10^13 synapses (about a tenth of the complexity of the human brain)."
Presumably, for very large values of "several".
And let's not forget the fact that human brain isn't just a lump of neurons. It has structure, which is vital for its proper operation. It's exactly like how it's not enough to simply throw a few million transistors together to have a functional computer; they must also be connected just right. The good old Pentium demonstrated this nicely.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Yes you can simulate a neuron, but the point is that this chip is not doing that. What they are calling the equivalent of a neuron here is at least an order of magnitude (likely more than one) simpler than a real neuron. That is why these comparisons where they say 1/10th the brain are vastly off base. Plus the effects of the glial cells on processing is showing that they have more importance than previously thought. Since we don't really understand the brain in any great detail, all these comparisons tend to make me wince. They almost always equate very simple circuits (relatively) to neurons. It is a red flag for hype really.
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.
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.
Further, we are behind schedule, skynet was to be done by 2009.
Just call it the "Singularity". It's well known enough. Can we get our own sub-slashdot?
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
At least I hope we'll have Culture overlords... drug glands, body manipulation and uploading to a Mind, at least.
People keep thinking about it being smarter than humans and doing typical science fiction type nonsense. The real problem isn't that but instead how such a small cluster these of chips could be made into a device to crack codes, bypass security, run a botnet, and do any similar task that generally requires human input or monitoring to react to changes or to invent new strategies. Computers have been historically bad at lateral thinking in the past. Are we sure we want to give them that ability?
Think of it like a dog that moves 1000x faster than you do. You go out to get the mail and when you get back a few minutes later, it's chewed your furniture into tatters, ate all the food, dug 50 holes in the back yard, and left about a dozen piles of poop to clean up. Leave for work and come back 8 hours later...(roughly equal to a year being left alone to the dog in this case)
Obviously a computer as smart as a human causes alarms to go off and people to be wary of it. But what harm can a bunch of robots with 1/10th the IQ do?(sic for the impaired) It's the ones that fly below the radar and are seen as "benign" that are the real cause for concern.
You are absolutely correct. I had a post replying to a Singularitarian (those who believe that we will be able to "upload" our selves) in the poll which covered the chemical soup modeling problem you've described as well as the I/O problem that I believe is fundamentally related. Since the other post wouldn't submit (had to re-login) I'll do some editing and put it here instead, since it is happily more topical overall.
Another thing that Singularitarians overlook is I/O. It's great that we may be able to model the structure of the human brain, but consciousness arises from and is continually affected by signals received from and sent to our sensing organs.
A human mind "trapped" in silicon would have to be somehow modified to accept an environment so utterly alien to its native one as to be likely perceived as noise, if indeed it perceived anything at all. Eyeballs work nothing like video cameras; they're much closer to specialized frequency analyzers. It would probably be less work to recreate the eyeball than to attempt to convert a video camera signal into something useful to the brain model, and the same goes for all of the other senses. A brain without a body simply isn't going to be very functional, especially when all that messy biological stuff that goes on in the chemical soup in which neurons are immersed has yet to be fully understood or modeled. Additionally, the brain's neural connections shift, shrink and grow constantly. Can a non-biological neural network do the same? (This is not a rhetorical question; I do not know the answer.)
I get the feeling that a lot of folks think we'll be able to just set up a mind, start typing questions at it, and receive answers. This view is simplistic in that it views the neural network of the brain as the only important bit of existence, when in reality we are complex patterns fully immersed and in many ways inseparable from our environment.
I used to be a Singularitarian myself (and I still enjoy fiction such as Charles Stross's Accelerando) until I read up on the fundamentals of psychology as described by William James in the late 1800s. Nearly everything in that field even today is consistent with James's discoveries in its infancy, and despite tremendous pressure to the contrary it demands that the separation of mind and body is little more than a sometimes useful fiction. Consciousness, like all sufficiently complex physical phenomena, is a dynamic process that is far too fluid for us to accurately model.
I suppose that if, as [the poster in the other thread suggests], technology will keep getting harder better faster stronger, it is conceivable that humans will eventually be able to succeed in modeling everything necessary to create a virtual environment for uploaded people to exist in, for without an environment they won't really be people (IMO they won't exhibit signs of consciousness at all). However, in addition to the hurdles I mentioned above that aren't being tackled, I have a hard time believing that technology will indeed keep getting harder better faster stronger. Maybe that's just because I'm 27 and, according to Slashdot, entering old age, but I have my reasons (see link in sig for a bunch of them). I also personally believe that following such a route is not a good idea even if possible, because we would become slaves to technology rather than using technology to better understand the mysteries of the wide reality which we confront daily.
Your brain is not a computer.
... what is the worst it can do?
Talk you to death?
You're not married, are you?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I disagree.
AS ti seems to be turning out, just replicating the brain can gives us results like a human brain.
We can use that to understand the brain. effectively creating a brain we can fiddle with in real time. We might even be able to give it a lifetime of simulated in a matter of days. If this methods continues to show these results, we will ahve a tool that will let us expand our understanding of how it works to fantastic levels.
We don't really ahve a good enough way to get a solid model to take the approach you suggest.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Nah. There's a lot of Republicans that would still choose to invade Iraq or argue against regulation of derivatives and tightening of leveraging restrictions for banks now, even with knowledge of all the facts (including the end results). There's probably Democrats that are similarly blinkered on past decisions despite the judgement of history
My definition of wisdom would be the ability to use experience and knowledge of the universe, including trends and human behaviour/psychological tendencies, to extrapolate from limited information and make the best choice possible under the circumstances. Bonus wisdom points if that choice isn't one of the popular or obvious options.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
That sort of symbol manipulation was the way AI was done for decades.
It turned out to be a dead end, which is why interest in things like neural networks, genetic algorithms, and subsumption architectures, has grown.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood