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."
Does it keep wanting cheezburgerz all the time?
Regards, Boyan
the first thing they teach it is to stop scratching my couch.
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!
Now if the could just get it out of sleep mode.
then "Deep Thought II"
then "Deep Blue"
next "Deep Pussy"??
Nah but it will refuse to be mouse operated ...
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.
It's often thought that gibibytes and tebibytes were invented to allow "giga" and "tera" to retain their conventional meanings as powers of 10 even when used to refer to quantities of data.
However, the true reason was to enable an entirely new form of pedantry.
Yes, yes it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_multiprocessing
In computing, symmetric multiprocessing or SMP involves a multiprocessor computer architecture where two or more identical processors can connect to a single shared main memory. Most common multiprocessor systems today use an SMP architecture. In the case of multi-core processors, the SMP architecture applies to the cores, treating them as separate processors.
You disagree with Wikipedia. That means you've been proven wrong in front of the whole Internet. Hang your head in shame.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Technically is a single Core2Duo/Quad or Core iX CPU considered SMP? I would guess no they are not.
Funnily enough, a single Core i7 or Opteron is SMP, but if you have multiple, then it isn't, it's NUMA because not all the processors have Symetric access to memory.
Core 2 is SMP for all standard configurations.
The enemies of Democracy are