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A Skeptical Reaction To IBM's Cat Brain Simulation Claims
kreyszig writes "The recent story of a cat brain simulation from IBM had me wondering if this was really possible as described. Now a senior researcher in the same field has publicly denounced IBM's claims."
More optimisticaly, dontmakemethink points out an "astounding article about new 'Neurogrid' computer chips which offer brain-like computing with extremely low power consumption. In a simulation of 55 million neurons on a traditional supercomputer, 320,000 watts of power was required, while a 1-million neuron Neurogrid chip array is expected to consume less than one watt."
Wouldn't power consumption grow more than linearly with neuron count? I would think the number of connections is the dominant factor - so the comparison of two data points of power consumption vs neuron count is meaningless.
"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him."
Ludwig Witgenstein - tractatus logico-philosophicus
From the original FA: "The simulation, which runs 100 times slower than an actual cat's brain, is more about watching how thoughts are formed in the brain and how the roughly 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses in a cat's brain work together."
So the most bad-ass computer simulation, assuming it worked, which this guy is saying it probably didn't, was still 100 times slower than a real cat's brain. A real cat's brain also fits inside a tiny furry space the size of a baseball... and it runs on a once-daily small bowl of cat food. We have a long ways to go.
So according to this guy rant letter, the "cat-brain simulation" was nothing more than the simulation of a ANN wiht X number of neurons with X equal to the average number of neurons in a cat.
However, it seems the /complexity/ of the simulated neurons is not remotely similar to that of the neurons of a real cat.
With that view, yes it seems less breakthrough. The experiment reminds me of AI researchers that thought that we could get intelligent machines using a brute-force kind of approach; this by adding /enough/ knowledge-rules, /enough/ processing power, etc...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
So with the nuerogrid chips, it will require at least a kilowatt to simulate.
So, a reduction of 319kW, then? That's pretty good.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
320kW / 55 = 5.818kW per million of neuro with a traditional supercomputer.
One watt per million of neuro with a Neurogrid chip array.
So if a cat's brain is 1 BILLION neurons, that would require 5818.182kW with a supercomputer and 1kW with the Neurogrid chip array.
A reduction of 5817.182kW.
Plus no one has any clue how the brain computes really so making a claim about the formation of thoughts is just nonsense.
Unfortunately, what a certain class of pseudo-scientist has learned is that monkeys in suits are too stupid to know the difference between real, conservative, careful science and over-hyped handwaving. Since we live in a world where monkeys in suits have managed to get almost total control of the corporate system and used that to leverage thier way into political power, people who suck up to the monkeys and make them feel good about themselves and their world by making outrageously false claims get rewarded with cash, while real scientists get left behind.
Our world increasingly looks like Fredrick Pohl's story "The Marching Morons", in which idiots have taken over the world (it's much more clever than the film "Idiocracy" was) and the idiots refer to the few remaining smart people, who keep things running, as "dummies". In retrospect, Pohl's story seems less about genetics (intelligence being at best very weakly heritable, as everyone with a brain knows) and more about the social factors that put money and power into the hands of exactly the kind of human who seeks money and power (rather than knowledge and serenity.)
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Insightful??
Hmmmph! My cat Phydeaux must have mod points again.
"I suspect consciousness will be a byproduct in such a system (as it is in us)..."
You are presupposing that human consciousness is an emergent trait, and that manifests itself once a certain level of processing capacity is reached. But that isn't really a position, more of a default - since we really don't know what it is, we don't know how to create it or model it, so we assume it sort of "shows up on it's own." But the problem with that model is that our conception of "intelligence" is inextricably linked with human consciousness.
You said
How an obvious question is "how do humans do it?" That answer invariably involves consciousness - a human's awareness of the situation, data, and decision process. It's an internal awareness, not an external input.
My opinion is that one cannot achieve "intelligence" without consciousness, at least as we understand intelligence. Human intelligence is the only one we have as a model. True, we observe and theorize about animal intelligence, but we know so much more about our own. Modeling AI on a cat brain, while an interesting exercise, could only lead to an artificial cat intelligence. But since we don't understand what cats "think" as it is, how do we know we hit the mark?
If we define intelligence without considering consciousness, we may well achieve AI. But it won't be an intelligence WE understand, and it won't give us insight into our own.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson