Slashdot Mirror
IBM Takes a (Feline) Step Toward Thinking Machines
bth writes "A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they've simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has."
(most modern PCs have just one or two processors)
Aren't we expected to know that? This is /. after all...
Does it keep wanting cheezburgerz all the time?
Regards, Boyan
the first thing they teach it is to stop scratching my couch.
So...
114 terabytes = 116 736 gigabytes
My machine has got 4 gigabytes of RAM, 100 000 x 4 = 400000... Hm?
One word...
Meow!
They've spent millions teaching a computer how to destroy furnature and shit in your shoes.
I've never shoed a horse, but I once told a donkey to piss off!
If Slashdot it to be trusted, there will soon be a sizeable number of cat brains living in our computers. Does anybody know why cats and not dogs or hamsters?
...and there's no way his brain power calls for 147,456 processors.
The blurb reminds me of the venerable Robokoneko project that never quite got off the ground.
So they have created a massive machine that will walk on a keyboard and complain that it's food dish is half empty. Why?
But does it run Linux?
Now if the could just get it out of sleep mode.
Skynet reference needed
the problem, IMO, for machines to tackle is that humans and animals both have a "will to exist"...all subsequent thoughts and actions in their respective brains derive from this from, giving the brain a purpose by directing the body to perform actions that satisfy it.
what equivalent purpose is there for a machine to exist? could such a purpose ever be simulated? does such a purpose need to have a biological characteristic in order for it to be valid? i think there needs to be more philosophical work done in the field of AI before another useless terabyte is added.
As seen in this article, you can achieve the simulation by throwing more hardware at it. There is also a solution that most people never think of: come up with a new algorithm that is faster then the current one and can simulate a brain with more efficiency then the one used. At that point, the hardware becomes less impressive.
Can it lick its own arse in polite company?
I thought the Lolcat epidemic was over. Now it is only going to get worse
The world is how you make it
It amazes me how much hardware and power has to be thrown at the problem to solve it while nature can create a self-organizing machine that only requires material input of raw mice and lasagna. Puts me in mind of this quote:
"If research leads to the development of successful new modeling techniques that can carry out new and better forms of information processing, no one will really care if they do not exactly mimic the functionality of the human brain," concludes Hall. "I honestly doubt you'll find too many people today who are upset that the wings on an aircraft do not flap like those of a bird or that a submarine does not swim exactly like a fish."
It's an interesting way of looking at things. Man's earliest ideas of flying all involved trying to mimic the actions of a bird. And ornithopters remain impractical as passenger vehicles. But new breakthroughs in material sciences and computing are allowing for autonomous bots that fly like birds, bats, bugs, and can swim like snakes and fish. Engineers will point out that the evolved solutions we see in nature are working with the materials at hand, they might not be the best of all solutions. Every flying vertebrate known to science turned forelimbs into wings and flap them. Is it the most efficient way to fly? That's an argument I'll leave to the biologists and engineers but it's certainly the only way those vertebrates were getting into the air! They have to work with the materials at hand. If we ever saw flying horses, the only thing we could be absolutely sure of is that this would not be achieved by sprouting two more limbs from the back. We see evolution taking away limbs but never adding new ones.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I'm going to go ahead and judge a book by it's cover. Given how primitive the summary is, I have doubts that this "supercomputer" matches a kitty's cerebral cortex 1-to-1. Having the "power" is one thing, but the learning aspect is another.
They'd have been much better off modeling it after a dog. At least if it failed to run the application correctly it's would look all sad and whine for forgiveness.
So now we have a computer that will play with you, then eat you... Great. Just freaking great. Awesome job!
Wheee.
Iz in ur brane, making ur thorts. LOL!
"The computer has 147,456 processors and 144 terabytes of main memory."
Cat? Really? Now we have a supercomputer than can stalk us and then trip us at the top of the stairs. Where's my robot dog?
After exhaustive research and excrutiating analysis, I've determined that Bubba is, in fact, everywhere.
"A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they've simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer."
So it basically puts itself in sleep mode 20 hours a day and the other 4 hours it spends ignoring the user?
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
Goodness gracious meow!
then "Deep Thought II"
then "Deep Blue"
next "Deep Pussy"??
This reminds me of the Spinnaker project, that pretended to simulate a brain (ok, a smaller one, say a fly's brain) in real time. According to their calculations, the processing power of each neuron is very small, so a simple ARM core could handle some 1000 (correct me, this is what I remember) neurons in real time. The complex point was the interconnections between neurons. Obviously, this is much more powerful, despite the 100x slowdown: A much larger brain, and not using specific hardware.
And he gets off on it.
A "feline" step, huh?
Would that be Leopard, Tiger, or Panther?
Nah but it will refuse to be mouse operated ...
"The latest feat, being presented at a supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., doesn't mean the computer thinks like a cat, or that it is the progenitor of a race of robo-cats." See, this is why no one on /. reads TFA; when we do, we're habitually disappointed! I'd much rather blindly believe the summary...
Moore's law predicts that computing power will double roughly every 2 years. Log base 2 of 147,456 is rounded up to 18 generations. In other words, in 36 years you can simulate a cat on your desktop. Of course you can always do that today with Nintencats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_and_the_Boingers
Here's the actual paper (pdf).
Although, of course, posting the piece of pap that explains how many processors my machine has makes so much more sense.
Wasn't Slashdot supposed to be for a semi-technical audience? Hell, even a semi-literate one.
sic transit gloria mundi
at 1:1 speed, you will be redundant.
And the simulated will not have rights, they will be tweaked to perform as slaves.
And you will be out of a job.
Technology advances to obsolete progressively less menial tasks.
Technology advances until _every_ human is obsolete.
Remember this.
Having done neuroscience research, (if only on a master's degree level), I can say that the cat brain is particularly well studied, mapped out, and understood by neuroscientists. It is used as a model organism by many neuroscientists, and has a number of similarities with the human brain in its layout and function, much moreso than the mouse or rat brain.
It sounds like they simulated a neural net with a comparable number of neurons.
Not the same thing.
A few days ago, Slashdot ran The Math of a Fly's Eye May Prove Useful.
Those guys
and they still don't understand how the equations actually work.
That's where we are with brain simulation.
The military is rumored to be interested in using the cat simulator to guide precision munitions with laser pointers. Unfortunately the system seems limited to short range applications, as missiles seem to loose interest after a couple minutes.
This project is basically a massive neural network simulation with a number of nodes and connections comparable to the estimated totals in a cat's brain. In short, there is nothing cat-like about this system apart from its raw processing power.
Not to reduce the value of this feat, by any means! There are tons and tons of neural network simulations that can produce roughly human-like results in very, very narrow domains, but as the quote below explains, these simulations are decades (or more) from connecting the behavior of tiny subsystems (a few hundred neurons) with the overall phenomenon of 'mind' (conscious and unconscious cognition). The expectation is that a network of this size will show some new emergent properties that will give us clues about the intermediate "higher than cells, lower than interviewing a human" order of processing.
Everything is easy when you don't understand the problem.
Just buy a cat.
I assume that it will walk all over its own keyboard now.
To me, this translates into "we've made a big unspecialized neural network and we're watching the weights update as we try to classify corporate logos with it". While building something on this scale is quite a feat, this is not really modeling a cat's cortex... unless you happen to be including specialized structures and modeling those parts of the brain differently. Does this thing have a hippocampus, for instance?
I believe that the ultimate test of an AI system is functional: can it solve mental challenges that cats can solve (on its own, without being instructed in them in advance)? If so, it's at least as intelligent as a cat. If not, it isn't.
This is probably why it's being presented at a supercomputing conference and not at something like AAAI.
So, SkyNet is a kitteh... it all makes sense now.
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
It'll accept 8 crashes before it finally dies the 9th time.
Can it cough up a technicolor hair-ball?
Hope is the currency of fools
Now I can sleep on top of a computer that is a cat!
I love my kitties, but they really do find the least helpful times to crawl onto my keyboard/chew through a cable/unplug my machine. Maybe now that there's a hybrid cat/computer it can explain to the organic ones why they need to chill out.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
I heard that IBM installed PawSense 2.0, which blocks output when "cat-like computation detected".
Towards the Singularity.
???
This reminds me of Aineko in Accelerando by Stross. I wonder how long until it becomes sentient and surpasses human intelligence. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_(novel) http://www.accelerando.org/
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
What the hell? 144TB isn't 100,000 times as much as what most consumers have now. 144TB divided by 100,000 = 1.47GB rounded up.
They don't even make hard drives that small anymore. Try again.
Disappointed that this article hasn't been ripped to shreds yet. It's clearly written by someone with very little insight into AI, supercomputing or philosophy. If it has a place on slashdot at all it's in the "idle" section.
That is a damn lonely and fat cat!
Cats are fun and magical when you can't smell their poop!
Fresh Step!
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
It just sits there licking itself. Plus, you can't use a mouse with it.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
If IBM wanted a cat intelligence that badly, wouldn't it have been cheaper to go to the SPCA?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
"The latest feat, being presented at a supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., doesn't mean the computer thinks like a cat, or that it is the progenitor of a race of robo-cats."
Whew! I'm glad they cleared that up, I was worried there for a minute. How stupid are people that they even have to state this?
My PCs at home have 8GB of RAM each. Now 144TB is a lot more, but only by 18,000 times.
When they boot that sucker, how long does the memory check take?
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Awww, that poor cat must be so scared. When they turned it on do you think all it did was just cry for milk?
The computer is down 20 hours a day, doesn't respond to you, is completely untrainable and never works, plus it's occasionally very high maintenance.
Actually, this also sounds like several of my ex-girlfriends. Are you sure that was a cat's brain they simulated?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
OK, so it takes nigh-on 150,000 processors to simulate a moggie brain at 1/100th of the usual speed. So now I have a handle on what such a brain can pull. See, I have some physics problems to solve, and there's the stray cat that hangs around outside my flat...
OH HAI. YOU UPGRADED MY RAM.
You just described two of the things I like more about cats than dogs.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Ha! it is an anime: "What do you get when you cross the brain of a cat with an android's body?"
If we place the powered-on computer in a sealed box filled with water, is the system still alive or is it dead?
to Abu Dhabi! That'll teach the computer not to be so cute...
Does it run Linux?
Ba-dump-bump!
(ducks from flying shoes)
I'm not cool enough to have a
... or even better a frog's brain, so I can develop applications without worrying too much about the bugs!
Can it catch a mouse? I didn't think so.
I did something similar this morning.
Now how hard was that?
...that it ignores every command they try to give it, looks at them with disdain and does nothing but try to sit on its own keyboard.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
My captors continue to torment me with bizarre dangling objects. They eat lavish meals in my presence while I am forced to subsist on dry cereal. The only thing that keeps me going is the hope of eventual escape... that, and the satisfaction I get from occasionally ruining some piece of furniture. I fear I may be going insane.
Every "revolutionary" new computer design has been called the next step to an electronic brain: the original eniacs in the 1940s, widrows neural networks in the 1960s, Deep Blue chess computer in the 1980s and so on.
simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain
10: INPUT(8) $SOUND
30: IF ($SOUND == 'CAN OPENER') GOTO 140
40: DO CASE (RND(4))
50 CASE 1:
60 CLAW_FURNITURE()
70 BREAK
80 CASE 2:
90 MARK_FURNITURE()
100 BREAK
110 CASE 3:
120 SLEEP(RND(10000))
130 CASE 4:
140 PRETEND_TO_BE_NICE()
150 IF (FOOD) EAT()
160 GOTO 10
170 ENDCASE
... but since it only took two transistors and a piece of chewing gum, they thought it best to keep it under wraps.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
If the machine can mimic a smart cat's brain then I guess it can mimic about 90% of humans.
If we get the same for a smart monkey brain then it will be more like 98%.
Seriously, that's the true problem this development might cause; the only reason why my 8 month old cat hasn't killed and eaten me is because she haven't figured out how to do that...yet.
One that hath name thou can not otter
If it isn't sleeping, some combination of "if"'s and "do while"'s that decide between "yowl if bowl is empty", "eat", "yowl for no reason", "show anus", "stare at nothing", "transition in/outside", "fight", and "play" would be a perfectly accurate simulator. All you need is a semi-random seed to mix it up a bit, and you probably couldn't tell the difference.
Now my computer will ignore me...unless it's hungry......
-Cnik
I for one, welcome our new Cyber Kitty Overlords
Provide you don't need a specific bread cats don't cost much. Now the trick is getting all those cats to sit still and not fight with each other. I am imagining a Beowulf cluster of cats.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
...will require far more computing power than would thinking. It's still very useful, though, because it allows us to study thinking.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The fact that they have stress this makes me suspicious. BTW, I can't find my mouse this morning...
I just looked into my /bin directory, and there it was: An executable clearly named "cat"!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
try writing the piece of code that finds the least accessible hole, duct or corner in your house to defecate.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I wonder if they implemented this routine?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
What about these guys? They've been mentioned by Slashdot before. Basically they're trying to completely simulate a complete (rat's) neocortical column, a basic building block of the cerebral cortex. Now, I know that IBM has oodles of money and resources, but if TFA is to be believed, IBM is saying they did 3 years ago what the BlueBrain researchers are saying is 10+ years away (complete simulation of a rat's cortex, consisting of hundreds of thousands of neocortical columns). Either IBM is making scarily fast advancements in this field, or BlueBrain is doing this the hard way.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Yikes, someone's taking bad care of their cat..... try cleaning out the kitty litter every once in awhile.
in an actual nerd-version of that article
Reading the TFA, it looks like they went to some trouble to model some specific brain structures and synapse properties, including inter-area connectivity and learning, in the model. So it's not "Just a big neural net." However the accuracy of the simulation is limited--both by what we know about the detailed structure of the cat's brain and by the number and complexity of the structures they decided to model.
How do you *test* something like this? I mean, you build all this hardware write a bunch of code, and I guess you can see activity that might look like an EEG, but how do you know you haven't just created some elaborate noisy feedback system? How do you know you haven't created an autistic mouse? Short of giving it a simulated DOOM environment to run around in and chase laser pointers, what actually is it *doing* anyway?
I never thought unit testing would verge on philosophical questions.
You've got a dead cat on your hands there after just one iteration, unless you constantly feed it. Oh, hold on, maybe that's right after all...
For what it's worth, here's a text dump from the Apple System Profiler on my MacBook Pro:
So, it would appear that Apple at least does not equate the number of cores and the number of processors.
This ain't rocket surgery.
If there will ever an electronic brain, those were indeed all steps toward it. And if there will never be an electronic brain, those may still have been steps toward it. Just that you make steps toward something doesn't mean you reach it. It doesn't even imply that you can reach it. I easily can make a step towards the sun when it is on the horizon. I'll never reach it that way, though.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I used to do this to my friends - when I was at highschool I used to write conversational simulators of people I knew using QBASIC. Throw in a few catchphrases and favourite memes and it is remarkably easy to catch the essence of a conversation with someone you know, especially if they're a geek. If they're rude, it's even easier, since you don't have to have such a coherent conversation. I've known people who wouldn't pass the Turing Test in normal conversation.
Somebody should try doing this for ... well, anyone famous really. The French government, Silvio Berlusconi, Theo de Raadt, Linus Torvalds ... all good targets, I suspect!
They need to add in the limbic and other closely tied-in systems before they can get a truly accurate simulation. without doing so, the virtual cat won't get angry, sad, happy, hungry, etc. It won't get dopamine, it won't get positive and negative feedback, it won't learn. The hormonal system of the body is arguably more important than the brain for survival. It codifies the most crucial instincts and provides a logical foundation for the more complex planning of the brain. Without it the cat won't meow. (or would do so relatively randomly)
Other projects include:
Homer Simpson Brain: Pentium 3, 128mb memory (70% cpu usage);
George W Bush Brain: Palm Pilot (10% cpu usage)
...termanatin yur connerz.
I, for one, welcome our new feline robot overlords.
is nowhere near as cuddly as the real thing
Imagine a Beowulf Cluthter of Thylvethterth !
They made a computer that sleeps for 20 hours a day?
nice work.
First meow!
None of you are terminating your strings! No wonder software has so many security holes!
Inefficient code will do that. Why do we need 2Ghz+ just to make a graphic display to show web pages?
Because a modern web browser has to parse several different markup languages and a horde of style sheet features - it needs to run a Javascript engine capable of changing any part of the document structure or source at any time, and the rendering component must be able to gracefully handle these changes... And people want features like auto-complete and suggestion in address and search bars, intelligent pre-fetching of certain content, and so on. Meanwhile there's plug-ins like Flash which are also considered part of "the web" by most people...
The code of the web has basically scaled to fit the capabilities of the machines it runs on, because people always want nicer things.
Bow-ties are cool.
My simulator just ignores all user input and pees on the rug behind the couch twice a day.
Since we now apparently have cat-machine-brain things.... Would any given Terminator movie have been better or worse if the Terminators' lines were entirely replaced by meows? What about LOLCat-themed lines?
I'll bet it gets pretty awkward when it does that thing where it licks itself with one leg sticking straight up in the air. And frustrating when it refuses any commands until it's hungry.
And I thought a PC had 1/4 of a processor (at least the way Windows runs on it)
Great - just what we need. A fucking computer that is untrainable.
*** Don't be dull.***
We had a kitten that was like that despite the litter box being perfect. When we took it to the vet, it turned out the kitten really WAS retarded - and a host of other health problems (vision, parasites), and had to be put down.
We had bought it at a flee market because it looked so pitiful. Decades later I still remember what it looked like - it's not always the owner's fault.
But yes, people really do need to clean their litter box daily. "Oh, I've got the clumping litter - I just remove what I have to!" doesn't work. What if I were to say - "I didn't wash the cup you're drinking out of - just removed the obvious stains."
Or they could teach the cat to go outside, same as a dog. Did that with one cat, worked great, even in winter.
...open a can of tuna.
No - only if it marks the furniture or claws it up - case 3 falls through to case 4, so as long as the cat behaves, it can sleep and eat :-)
(From Sealab 2021)
Sparks: Um, ok, but remember, you'll have the strength of five gorillas.
Debbie DuPree: Why settle for a cat Hesh? You could be a robot... tiger.
Marco: No, no, no! Absolamente no! If I have to be five foot nothing Hesh can't be a tiger!
Captain Murphy: Your not the boss of tiger bot Hesh!
Sarah Palin.
10 INPUT $S 20 PRINT "It's not my fault! " . TRIM(SUBSTR($S, RND(10), RND(8))) " is to blame!" 30 GOTO 10
Question: Has Sarah Palin read her new book?
This system is already brighter than Palmisano and his staff combined. Probably do a whole lot less damage to the company.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That is just so true - once they take a liking to a spot, try to get them to stop.
There was one cat that liked to wander into companies (you'd be surprised at how easy that is in smaller businesses, or places with shipping doors open), find a nice warm printer or fax machine, curl up on it for a few minues ("aw, that's sooo cute"), then get up and mark its' new territory.
welcome our new cat supercomputer overlords!
You left out the all-important "attempt_to_kill_owner" loop.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
That's what I was talking about, the cats had a big garden at their disposal and were taught to ask to go out.
Except one that would peek outside, see it's raining and turn back, to leave a "hidden surprise".
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
So this is basically the first step to a Copy of a cat.
Ray Kurzweill's "The Singularity is Near" predicts human brain simulation within 20-30 years. His predictions are based on estimates in hardware advances (e.g., Moore's Law), advances in AI, Neuroscience, and other technologies required to crack this problem. His work was vetted by experts in those fields (he is an expert in AI) and since the book's publication in 2005, no serious objections have been raised about the underlying science and engineering required to simulate the human brain. IBM's simulation of a cat's cerebral cortex is a step towards ultimately simulating a human brain. Kurzweill's argument (accelerating change) indicates that the IBM simulation will be followed by other simulations of increasing complexity and the rate that these simulations are undertaken will accelerate over time. Perhaps Ray could chime in here and put this thing into perspective.
I wonder how hard it was to simulate curiosity?
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/mole00/mole00246.htm
I find being offended by me offensive.
Funnily enough she was at the back of my mind when I wrote that ;-)
Most politicians actually only need one or two phrases at a time, so we could probably refactor the code to be more generic!
I can write a simulation of a cat's cerebral cortex that will run on my MacBook. It would be a bad simulation, but a simulation nonetheless.
The article doesn't explain to what level the cortex is simulated. Are they simply modeling the connections? Are they modeling 3D structure? Are they modeling chemical electrical transmissions? Are they modeling gene expression? The Blue Brain Project (http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/page18699.html) currently simulates the activity of a single neocortical column (of which there are approximately 2 million in humans) using 8146 processors to model the 3D structure of the neurons and their interactions.
Given that TFA says 147456 processors for the entire cortex, it must be using a much simpler simulation than the Blue Brain Project.
If the computing model fails to account for a my cat's fascination with his own hind quarters then I will consider it an epic fail.
I, for one, welcome our cybernetic feline overlords.
-Z
You know it's only a matter of time before "There's an app for that!" Or if Apple wants to be stuck-in-the-mud, there'll be a droid version.
Or modify BabyShaker.app so that every time she tweets anything, you can shake her and watch her head bobble around.
on what software you are trying to license.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
logic lacks ability to wake up *to* the sound of can opener.
Actually, the simulation isn't the big deal. This is: "We have developed a new algorithm, BlueMatter, that exploits the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging." So they're also developing techniques to extract the wiring diagram of living brains. That's significant.
Don't read too much into the amount of supercomputer hardware required. They're running what's basically a circuit simulator, and those are inefficient but flexible. When NVidia develops a new graphics chip, they test and debug by compiling the VHDL into C, and running it, slowly, on about thirty racks of 1U servers. When that's working, the VHDL is compiled down to IC masks and the consumer part that's a few centimeters across is fabricated. That kind of shrink ratio should be expected once the R&D effort figures out what to fab.
It should run Eliza to make people think it's really a brain.
OK a new size TV
... welcome our new simulated cat overloards.
I'm guessing all 4 came from people working in IT. Probably self-taught, but possible with a degree (which would have to be Computer Science). Something about computer programming, with its potential for nearly limitless individual accomplishment, puts the brain in an interesting state. Maybe a future simulation will show why people who gleefully apply O notation and contribute useful information where abstract software is concerned end up being disruptive in other scientific subject. Interest without ability leads to irrelevant jokes.
and it will think outside the litter box
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Cats are logical? Just the thought makes me want to cough up a hairball :-)
Unfortunately, it's completely unservicable.
I heard that if you open the case to check the hardware, there is always a dead CPU.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
If you leave off sensing people allergic to cats for 800, it ought to be doable with quite simple hardware.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Possessive "its" never needs an apostrophe -- it is a direct analog of "his" and "hers"...
We have a pretty good map of the nematode's "brain", as its whole body has about 1000 cells. So why has no one simulated a complete nematode in virtual-space to prove that their simulation can actually do something other than generate huge amounts of raw data? Show me non-faked realistic behavior from a simple sim-worm before you make claims about "simulating the thinking part of a cat's brain". (And what's with that "thinking part of the brain" phrase?)
I'm also unclear on this and other articles as to whether the researchers supposedly modeled the brain tissue on the individual cell level or lower, as opposed to treating whole chunks of cells as one unit. We don't really have the tech yet to get a complete map of every synapse in a cat cortex, do we?
Revive the Constitution.
... a LOLcat cluster of these
sorry, couldn't resist
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
from the producers of When Harry Met Sally and directed by McG comes the incredibly action-packed romance adventure that both guys and gals will love...
"When SkyNet Met CatNip"
SkyNet: "Hi. I'm SkyNet. What's you're name?"
CatNip: "CatNip."
SkyNet: "Compute here often?"
And then some idiot brought in a laser pointer and the machine destroyed itself trying to catch the dot.
That is all.
I remember back in '99ish getting a graph with X=time and Y=computer power (mips, exponential not linear increase), positions on the Y axis were marked with organism complexity equivalents. On the graph were plotted a bunch of points showing computing breakthroughs. I drew a rough best fit curve through these and continued it into the future, at that time we were somewhere around the more complicated end of amoebas, perhaps entering very simple insects.
The curve hit mouse right around the date when that psp ad about having the complexity of a mouse came out, 2003 I think it was.
We aren't due for cat for another year I think, but the graph was whole organism complexity (I think).
The curve reached chimpanzee complexity around 2012, and human only a few months later.
Ever since then when I told people about it the response was "yes but Moores law cant go on for ever, and now it seems like we cant get any further, X has just about reached its limits"
seems like we are right on schedule.
678: Out of milk
Their they're doing there hair.
Wait. You bought the cat at a fle[a] market?
Their they're doing there hair.
So they created an AI that continuously ponders the question, "where do they least want me right now?"