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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.
Now if the could just get it out of sleep mode.
Can it lick its own arse in polite company?
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
Iz in ur brane, making ur thorts. LOL!
"The computer has 147,456 processors and 144 terabytes of main memory."
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.
No, they created a machine which ignores them. They're getting no response, so they know that they succeeded.
Nah but it will refuse to be mouse operated ...
Sounds like Windows ME.
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
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.
Sounds like Windows ME.
Windows MEow in this case.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
It'll accept 8 crashes before it finally dies the 9th time.
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.
Moore's law predicts that the transistor count will double.
Yeah, that's a whole lot of por—oh, dear God, no!
I did something similar this morning.
Now how hard was that?
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
...termanatin yur connerz.
None of you are terminating your strings! No wonder software has so many security holes!
My simulator just ignores all user input and pees on the rug behind the couch twice a day.
And I thought a PC had 1/4 of a processor (at least the way Windows runs on it)
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.
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
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
I hate scooping my girlfriend's litter box.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
And then some idiot brought in a laser pointer and the machine destroyed itself trying to catch the dot.
That is all.