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Spaun: a Large-Scale Functional Brain Model
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.)"
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.
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.
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.
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).