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Spaun: a Large-Scale Functional Brain Model

Posted by Soulskill on from the can-it-learn-to-program-my-vcr dept.

New submitter dj_tla writes "A team of Canadian researchers has created a state-of-the-art brain model that can see, remember, think about, and write numbers. The model has just been discussed in a Science article entitled 'A Large-Scale Model of the Functioning Brain.' There have been several popular press articles, and there are videos of the model in action. Nature quotes Eugene Izhikevich, chairman of Brain Corporation, as saying, 'Until now, the race was who could get a human-sized brain simulation running, regardless of what behaviors and functions such simulation exhibits. From now on, the race is more [about] who can get the most biological functions and animal-like behaviors. So far, Spaun is the winner.' (Full disclosure: I am a member of the team that created Spaun.)"

9 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. How Long Until It Can Fit Into ..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    .... something the size of a human skull?

    Just imagine how many people this could help!

  2. Close... by tool462 · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's not purely functional unless it's written in Haskell.

  3. My God... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The golden age of humanity will start soon. The last gasp of the fossil fuel powered consumer society is now. We will create a new model of society, with longer living people and an understanding of how life works at the cellular, and most importantly, mathematical level. The future is not space, it's synthetic biology.

  4. Runs at 1/3600 real time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This simulation takes an hour to simulate one second of neural activity, but the researchers want to speed it up to real time. Why stop there? This brain would be much more interesting if it could simulate an hour of neural activity in one second.

    Just a caution, though: make sure the physical arm it's connected to isn't within reach of any nuclear footballs.

  5. Emulated behaviour is amazing by xtal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The fact this responds in similar ways is astonishing.. not because of what this model has accomplished, but because it's a great big flashing light pointing to this being the right way to machine intelligence. "HEY OVER HERE!"

    I'll pre order his book, and wait patiently for an open source version of this research / model to appear for people to hack on.

    It's slow now, but 1/3600 speed within the next generation of computers to do in real time - and that's without optimization.

    Interesting times indeed.

    --
    ..don't panic
    1. Re:Emulated behaviour is amazing by dj_tla · · Score: 5, Informative

      This model is already open source! I have been very adamant about keeping this the case in the Eliasmith lab. The model is here, and the software running it is here (and on github).

    2. Re:Emulated behaviour is amazing by perceptual.cyclotron · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I was actually about to upmod because in general I agree (and for the record, I have a PhD in cog neuro), and based on the summary and the nature write-up, I was underwhelmed. But skimming the Science paper, these guys have legitimately done something that really hasn't been done before. The model gets a picture that tells it what task it's supposed to do, preserves that context while getting the task-relevant input, gets the answer to the problem (and the problems are, computationally, pretty wide-ranging), and writes the answer (i.e., it's not being read out from the state of a surface layer and transcoded to a human-readable result). All of this is being done with reasonably-realistic spiking neurons (with Eliasmith, these are probably single-compartment LIF), configured in a gross-scale topology commensurate with what we know about neuroanatomy and connectivity.

      Is this going to unleash a new revolution in AI and cybernetics? Nope. But it's definitely both impressive and progressive for the field. Both Eliasmith and Izhikevich are the real deal. And while we certainly don't understand the brain well enough to make truly general-intelligence models, this kind of work is precisely the sort of step we need to be taking – scaling down the numbers but trying to reproduce the known connectivity is a lot more useful than building 10^10 randomly connected McCulloch-Pitts neurons...

  6. Re:paywall / links to summary by dj_tla · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hey, I'm still figuring out the copyright rules as to what I can post, but there are plenty of things already available:

    This paper on Spaun specifically
    Some background on how Spaun is built
    Some background (with code) on the theoretical framework used
    The actual code for Spaun

    I'll let you know if a pre-print goes up!

    We do use Python scripting to interface with our simulator, Nengo. See the last link for the actual script we use for Spaun.

  7. Re:Hardware Requirement: 24 GB RAM by dj_tla · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hey, we're definitely thinking about this! In fact, the Java version can run on a GPU. And we're in the process of making a fast Python version based on theano. Unfortunately, even with all of these speedups, we're still talking about lots of neurons and lots of computation.

    However, there are plenty of smaller scale models that you can run in Nengo to get a sense of what's going on in the larger Spaun model! The tutorials are a good place to start.