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."

Comments

news for nerds

[blitzkrieg3]

(most modern PCs have just one or two processors)

Aren't we expected to know that? This is /. after all...

Re:news for nerds

[visualight]

Yes it does, don't be pedantic.

Re:news for nerds

[MaskedSlacker]

What I want to know is how is the fact that you guessed supposed to make your erroneous spouting better?

When you spout misinformation, which is a serious problem on the internet (i'm looking at you conspiracy theorists), the fact that you guessed doesn't absolve you, since 15 seconds effort on your part would have meant 1 less piece of misinformation forever preserved.

I propose that you sir are an internet asshole (not that this particular piece of misinformation means a goddamn thing, since everyone who reads /. knew you were wrong, but THINK OF THE KITTENS!)

Point is, misinformation is a problem here, and being glib about the fact that you're a lazy trollop makes it worse, not better.

A pile of neurons does not a brain make...

[swm]

From TFA, it doesn't sound like they simulated the cerebral cortex of a cat.
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

• reverse engineered the yaw motion detector in a fly brain
• reduced the neural network to a set of 5 coupled, non-linear equations
• implemented the equations on a computer
• ran their implementation against an animated scene
• observed that the equations correctly and robustly detect yaw

and they still don't understand how the equations actually work.

That's where we are with brain simulation.

cat-SIZED brain, not a cat brain

[WAG24601G]

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.

Jim Olds, a neuroscientist and director of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, called the new research a "tremendous step." Olds, who was not involved in IBM's work, said neuroscientists have been amassing data about how the brain works much like "stamp collectors," without a way to tie it together.

"We've made tremendous advances in collecting data, but we don't have a collective theory yet for how this complex organ called the brain produces things like Shakespeare's sonnets and Mozart's symphonies," he said. "The holy grail for neuroscientists is to map activity from single nerve cells, which they know about, into how billions of nerve cells act in concert."