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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)."
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
I for one plan on collaborating with the Cylons.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
Can't be satisfied with machines that act as quiet servants... have to make them intelligent enough to suffer...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
You might be correct, but it is also possible that the "humanity" of the human brain is an emergent property that manifests only when there's a certain critical mass of grey matter. Developing synthentic neural systems with more and more neurons is likely, if nothing else, to test the hypothesis that consciousness, for some arbitrary definition thereof, is emergent.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these imagining a beowulf cluster of these!!
No, the artificial politician brain has 200,000 morons. Tim S
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
omg they have invented an electronic republican.
int main(){ while (1) { /* FIXME: keep_happy() ignores entries with too small contributions assigned, to avoid race conditions */
printf("%s", random_nonsensical_bullshit());
printf("God bless America!");
bank_account += take_campaign_contribution(contributor_list);
if (elected) keep_happy(contributor_list);
}
return bank_account;
}
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.
I am one of the researchers involved in this project. You are right, of course, that we are only simulating 0.1% or less of the complexity of the brain, so even if we simulate 100% of the number of neurons in the brain, we are still orders of magnitude of complexity away from reproducing a brain, let alone understanding it.
However, we have to start somewhere and, in the words of Henry Markram (Blue Brain Project) "If we don't start now, when do we start?". The neuron models in the chip ignore spatial processing in the dendrites, but they do reproduce the variety of firing patterns found in real cortical neurons. The models of the chemical synapses incorporate have both short-term (adaptation, etc) and long-term (learning) plasticity, based on experimental data. Neuromodulation (by dopamine, etc) could be simulated by modifying synaptic and neuronal parameters, using the digital logic on the chips, although we haven't really thought about this yet.
The FACETS project involves experimental neurobiologists, theoreticians, modellers, and solid-state physicists (who are developing the chips). We are very aware of the necessary simplifications we are making, but we are also confident that we are making progress both in understanding brain function and in developing new approaches to highly-parallel, fault-tolerant computing.