Mapping The Brain To Build Better Machines (quantamagazine.org)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quanta Magazine: An ambitious new program, funded by the federal government's intelligence arm, aims to bring artificial intelligence more in line with our own mental powers. Three teams composed of neuroscientists and computer scientists will attempt to figure out how the brain performs these feats of visual identification, then make machines that do the same. "Today's machine learning fails where humans excel," said Jacob Vogelstein, who heads the program at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). "We want to revolutionize machine learning by reverse engineering the algorithms and computations of the brain." By the end of the five-year IARPA project, dubbed Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (Microns), researchers aim to map a cubic millimeter of cortex. That tiny portion houses about 100,000 neurons, 3 to 15 million neuronal connections, or synapses, and enough neural wiring to span the width of Manhattan, were it all untangled and laid end-to-end.

Comments

If you want to avoid religious issues

[fustakrakich]

Stay away from the right parietal lobe...

Re: This will just allow those...

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking your mind turns you into a threat that must be measured. Now you don't even have to speak!

Pure delusion

[Anonymous Coward]

This cargo-cult approach to AI is ridiculous. Decades of effort have produced absolutely no result. Oh, but this time we're way smarter and better informed, surely we'll produce something of value this time. Gimme the grant monies, plz.

Oh, but this one is worse. It's not that gigantic failure. The laughable failure they're repeating this time is far, far, older: "We want to revolutionize machine learning by reverse engineering the algorithms and computations of the brain."

Computationalism?! Seriously? Not only is that laughable, it's been laughable for ages! Don't think so? People have been born and died of old age waiting for that bit of fiction to produce any results. So far? Nothing. On top of it all, there's more than one good reason to suspect it's never going to produce any results.

Let's base one retarded idea on another retarded idea and mix in a bunch of childish thinking about the function of the brain based on zero evidence. AI breakthrough!

Re:Pure delusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not the whole brain? I hope they pick the good part.

Re:Pure delusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Cynicism isn't productive or warranted. The mechanisms of the brain are already the basis of the most useful machine learning algorithms. Statistical inference only goes so far and really relies on assumptions that limit application to an ever smaller subset of the real world's problems. Don't let the problems from media hype and marketing jargon delude you into ignoring the real and practical utility of this approach. It is modeling the network of that region of the brain and using our existing cognitive psychology knowledge to tease out useful algorithms, not reproducing it to use directly and without any additional work. This is just the starting point for a new area of research, and the knowledge gained will be the foundation for many future applications.

Re:Pure delusion

[Anonymous Coward]

This cargo-cult approach to AI is ridiculous. Decades of effort have produced absolutely no result. Oh, but this time we're way smarter and better informed, surely we'll produce something of value this time. Gimme the grant monies, plz.

Oh, but this one is worse. It's not that gigantic failure. The laughable failure they're repeating this time is far, far, older: "We want to revolutionize machine learning by reverse engineering the algorithms and computations of the brain."

Computationalism?! Seriously? Not only is that laughable, it's been laughable for ages! Don't think so? People have been born and died of old age waiting for that bit of fiction to produce any results. So far? Nothing. On top of it all, there's more than one good reason to suspect it's never going to produce any results.

Let's base one retarded idea on another retarded idea and mix in a bunch of childish thinking about the function of the brain based on zero evidence. AI breakthrough!

What is your approach to building a strong AI then? We are waiting for your reply.

In other news, the amount of progress into AI research depends on what fronts you judge the progress and there have been numerous steps forward but none of them have resulted in C3P0 style robots because that is not the goal.

There are functionalists who largely congregate at MIT and Harvard who do not believe that studying the human brain will yield any immediate results that can be implemented in silicon

There are the Cal tech researchers who are largely behavioralists who believe studying psychology and to a limited degree physiology will point the general direction in terms of large milestones that have to be achieved to build a strong AI, using nature as a guide.

Then there are the Connectionists and this includes Francois Crick, who believe that the neural connections as a functional network will yield a base cortical algorithm which can be applied to a number of things that also include the beginnings of building a Strong AI.

There are a lot of things that have been gained by these approaches to the problem so to say as you did that nothing has been accomplished is about as wrong as wrong can get. We know for instance, that the processing "program" of the human brain uses the same functional unit that is repeated over and over and is adapted and adaptable to vision processing, audio processing, kinesthetic processing and very likely (almost certainly) everything else in terms of recognizing adapting to and predicting (prediction is a strong indicator of intelligence among other behavioral emergent patterns) patterns and sequences of patterns between inputs and outputs. If you surgically connect auditory nerves to visual cortex the visual cortex adapts to process inputs from the eardrums, if you connect optic nerves to audio cortex, audio cortex processes visual information.. with no further manipulation.. that is quite a big value for "nothing being accomplished" as you put it.. Heres the kicker of how wrong you are:

A camera device has been developed that non-invasively communicates digital information as points of pressure onto the tongue of the wearer, thereby allowing a completely blind person to navigate and "see" through the camera via the sensation on the tongue. But no, we have not accomplished anything involving the understanding of how the brain processes information and yes we just should abandon this line of research because it will not accomplish anything at all.

You are right man, Deep Blue did not beat Kasparov and no IBM's Watson did not win against champion humans on Jeopardy.. so we might as well not even try.

Sheesh! Don't even bother to answer unless you have actual points to make with cited references.. go back to putzing around in Minecraft ok?

Re:Pure delusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's the old familiar bio-inspired engineering. You know, the same approach that produced Velcro, lighter and stronger metal and composite structures and genetic algorithms, among other things. This is the US version of the theme, which do already have it's critics (budget, results) in the similar type of project in Europe.

Re:Pure delusion

[phantomfive]

This cargo-cult approach to AI is ridiculous. Decades of effort have produced absolutely no result.

Says someone who clearly hasn't kept up with recent advances in cognitive science.

Re:Pure delusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Cynicism isn't productive

Neither is computationalism. It's like saying they're going to crack strong AI through phrenology.

or warranted.

Oh, I'd say it's warranted. What other reaction could a reasonable person have to this? Imagine if someone announced that they're going to make significant advances in perpetual motion thanks to phlogiston theory. That's exactly what this sounds like to anyone who isn't a Kurzweil cultist.

Here's a neat idea. Let's let go of old, long disproved, ideas and try something new. The alternative, after all, is to keep carefully adjusting the weights on your unbalanced wheel hoping that some day it'll spin in perpetuity.

Re:Pure delusion

[narcc]

What is your approach to building a strong AI then? We are waiting for your reply.

I don't have one. Of course, neither does anyone else. That said, beating on long disproved approaches isn't exactly going to get us anywhere.

Computationalism is as dead as spontaneous generation. You don't need an alternative to find out that something doesn't work, and is never going to work. You'd have us repeat the same failure over and over rather than work toward finding a new approach because ... you can't personally think of any alternative so the provably wrong approach must be correct?

In other news, the amount of progress into AI research depends on what fronts you judge the progress and there have been numerous steps forward but none of them have resulted in C3P0 style robots because that is not the goal.

Oh, okay. You're an idiot. We're talking about strong AI here. That's the subject. All that other stuff is not in any way related to strong AI, and it is well known that it can not lead to strong AI.

, Deep Blue did not beat Kasparov and no IBM's Watson

Neither of which have anything to do with Strong AI. Worse they are extremely special purpose and use a hybrid of traditional algorithms and machine learning techniques. They're about as far from strong AI as you can get -- and have fuck all to do with computationalism. Are you just repeating bullshit you read on some Kurzweil fan site?

we know for instance, that the processing "program" of the human brain uses the same functional unit that is repeated over and over and is adapted [...] patterns and sequences of patterns between inputs and outputs.

Yeah, you're deeply confused. You seem to believe we have a far greater understanding of the brain and how it functions than we actually do. It's not your fault. I blame movies and TV shows.

Don't even bother to answer unless you have actual points to make with cited references

Yeah, there's a reason you didn't provide those to support your load of horse shit. It's because you don't even have the faintest understanding about the topic, and there isn't a paper out there that could lend even a tiny bit of credibility to your nonsense.

Re:Pure delusion

[mugurel]

Here's an interview with Yann Lecun. He's also sceptical about such undertakings, but he argues more convincingly: http://spectrum.ieee.org/autom...

Re:Pure delusion

[religionofpeas]

I don't have one. Of course, neither does anyone else. That said, beating on long disproved approaches isn't exactly going to get us anywhere. Computationalism is as dead as spontaneous generation. You don't need an alternative to find out that something doesn't work, and is never going to work. You'd have us repeat the same failure over and over rather than work toward finding a new approach because ... you can't personally think of any alternative so the provably wrong approach must be correct?

If you don't have a better plan, then it doesn't hurt to keep working on the old one. How long have people worked on human powered helicopters before they finally had some success ? I don't see you offering any fundamental reason why computationalism is dead.

Re:Pure delusion

[Anonymous Coward]

What is your approach to building a strong AI then? We are waiting for your reply.

I don't have one. Of course, neither does anyone else. That said, beating on long disproved approaches isn't exactly going to get us anywhere.

Computationalism is as dead as spontaneous generation. You don't need an alternative to find out that something doesn't work, and is never going to work. You'd have us repeat the same failure over and over rather than work toward finding a new approach because ... you can't personally think of any alternative so the provably wrong approach must be correct?

In other news, the amount of progress into AI research depends on what fronts you judge the progress and there have been numerous steps forward but none of them have resulted in C3P0 style robots because that is not the goal.

Oh, okay. You're an idiot. We're talking about strong AI here. That's the subject. All that other stuff is not in any way related to strong AI, and it is well known that it can not lead to strong AI.

, Deep Blue did not beat Kasparov and no IBM's Watson

Neither of which have anything to do with Strong AI. Worse they are extremely special purpose and use a hybrid of traditional algorithms and machine learning techniques. They're about as far from strong AI as you can get -- and have fuck all to do with computationalism. Are you just repeating bullshit you read on some Kurzweil fan site?

we know for instance, that the processing "program" of the human brain uses the same functional unit that is repeated over and over and is adapted [...] patterns and sequences of patterns between inputs and outputs.

Yeah, you're deeply confused. You seem to believe we have a far greater understanding of the brain and how it functions than we actually do. It's not your fault. I blame movies and TV shows.

Don't even bother to answer unless you have actual points to make with cited references

Yeah, there's a reason you didn't provide those to support your load of horse shit. It's because you don't even have the faintest understanding about the topic, and there isn't a paper out there that could lend even a tiny bit of credibility to your nonsense.

You are the idiot that has no idea what is going on in the world of science Narcc.. oh by the way I see you got your internet access back from your mom.. Next time make sure your little brother has not hidden the video camera in the bedroom before throwing a fit and sticking the remote control up your butt.

I point out commonly known research areas apparently you are not read up on. It is not my fault that you are an idiot that can't do a google search. You seem confused here that I am going to write a college dissertation to prove a point to the WOW freakout kid. You need an education kid!

Re:Pure delusion

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, he actually said "Let's base one retarded idea on another retarded idea and mix in a bunch of childish thinking about the function of the brain based on zero evidence."

Zero evidence? I guess he hit his head under the desk one too many times and went blind and deaf.

Funny how insecure this type of thing seems to make people. It's still quite a leap from emulating the brain's computation to fully simulating human cognition, and a leap further to make proclamations based on this about human consciousness. Leaps that we are not currently in any position to make. But computationally (as for step 1) we are way ahead, and have been making drastic progress for over 60 years. Zero evidence??

CAPTCHA: dreams

Re:Pure delusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh, Narcc is such an arrogant idiot, I had no idea he was the kid on youtube who stuck a remote control up his butt a few years ago but, it figures that that is who he is! If he doesn't get the response he wants from his posts he just "SCREAMS THE SAME THING LOUUUUUDER!!!!" and expects people to just fall in line.

What a fucking moron!

Re:Pure delusion

[Anonymous Coward]

What is your approach to building a strong AI then? We are waiting for your reply.

I don't have one. Of course, neither does anyone else. That said, beating on long disproved approaches isn't exactly going to get us anywhere.

Computationalism is as dead as spontaneous generation. You don't need an alternative to find out that something doesn't work, and is never going to work. You'd have us repeat the same failure over and over rather than work toward finding a new approach because ... you can't personally think of any alternative so the provably wrong approach must be correct?

In other news, the amount of progress into AI research depends on what fronts you judge the progress and there have been numerous steps forward but none of them have resulted in C3P0 style robots because that is not the goal.

Oh, okay. You're an idiot. We're talking about strong AI here. That's the subject. All that other stuff is not in any way related to strong AI, and it is well known that it can not lead to strong AI.

, Deep Blue did not beat Kasparov and no IBM's Watson

Neither of which have anything to do with Strong AI. Worse they are extremely special purpose and use a hybrid of traditional algorithms and machine learning techniques. They're about as far from strong AI as you can get -- and have fuck all to do with computationalism. Are you just repeating bullshit you read on some Kurzweil fan site?

we know for instance, that the processing "program" of the human brain uses the same functional unit that is repeated over and over and is adapted [...] patterns and sequences of patterns between inputs and outputs.

Yeah, you're deeply confused. You seem to believe we have a far greater understanding of the brain and how it functions than we actually do. It's not your fault. I blame movies and TV shows.

Don't even bother to answer unless you have actual points to make with cited references

Yeah, there's a reason you didn't provide those to support your load of horse shit. It's because you don't even have the faintest understanding about the topic, and there isn't a paper out there that could lend even a tiny bit of credibility to your nonsense.

Good god Narcc, just stop commenting on /. seriously! Your insane trolling and lack of any references or any type of general sensibility about adding to the discussion is annoying to everyone! Just stop digging the hole deeper! The more you post the more there are people out there in the peanut gallery going "My god what is wrong with Narcc!"

Re:Pure delusion

[Anonymous Coward]

What is your approach to building a strong AI then? We are waiting for your reply.

I don't have one. Of course, neither does anyone else. That said, beating on long disproved approaches isn't exactly going to get us anywhere.

No surprise, so you have no support for your argument?? What is it you are arguing here? Because it is not clear at all. You bring up the straw man argument of something you call "Disproved approaches" yet you have not shown in any way shape or form what this "disproved approach" is or why it will never work, you just use it as a label to try to prove your meandering argument. You fail at this miserably. Meanwhile in narrow fields leading to the nuts and bolts of processes and methodologies of strong AI outlining processes of activities that an AI would do, such a playing chess and go at greater than grandmaster levels, that point of progress is old news. Troll on if you want to, but you're digging your hole deeper Narcc.

References:

Deep Blue

Of important note here is your claim that deep blue did not beat Kasparov, from the above link:

"Deep Blue won its first game against a world champion on February 10, 1996, when it defeated Garry Kasparov in game one of a six-game match. However, Kasparov won three and drew two of the following five games, defeating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2. Deep Blue was then heavily upgraded, and played Kasparov again in May 1997. Deep Blue won game six, therefore winning the six-game rematch 3½–2½ and becoming the first computer system to defeat a reigning world champion in a match under standard chess tournament time controls.[1] Kasparov accused IBM of cheating and demanded a rematch. IBM refused and retired Deep Blue."

Deep blue did defeat Kasparov in the second match, game 6, therefore you are wrong..

Computer_Go

Watson AI

You just say Watson, no.. which it is not clear what you mean but you know the drill, from the above link on Watson:

" In 2011, Watson competed on Jeopardy! against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings.[3][6] Watson received the first place prize of $1 million"

Wrong again!

as you point out, neither is a strong AI , however they outline progress into the types of stochastic processes that a strong AI would utilize in the execution of such activities as a proof of concept, so there are your references to this point that you are wrong. You have so far not pointed out anything that "disproves" anything or even supports your murky attempts at making a point. You go on with more BS, shall we continue?

Computationalism is as dead as spontaneous generation. You don't need an alternative to find out that something doesn't work, and is never going to work. You'd have us repeat the same failure over and over rather than work toward finding a new approach because ... you can't personally think of any alternative so the provably wrong approach must be correct?.

Again it is unclear as to what you mean, Spontaneous generation? really? So you are saying that computer algorithms do not work and you compare them to the idea that life is generated from dead matter, such as fly larva being spontaneously generated from decaying meat? really? That is more than a weak argument, it is another logical fallacy! Saying something is never going to work is a big claim, and you need big proof to make that one stick. Acting like the whole argument is bollocks is not going to help you without pointing out SOME shred of evidence and not invoking some sort of non-sequitur of "we were wrong about tadpoles coming from silt.. so we are wrong about this .. you idiot!" on that, ad-hominems only weaken your lame argument here, and I don't have to think of an a

Re:Pure delusion

[Anonymous Coward]

You're welcome to find any approach you like in creating a strong AI. No one is stopping you.

Re:Pure delusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off troll, you made up a post to respond to by selecting the first sentence.

Re:Pure delusion

[sabbede]

You act like computationalism was disproven or has been generally discarded. This is not the case. Not by a long shot.

Whose Brain??

[zenlessyank]

Very important factor.

Re:Whose Brain??

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's ask Tay about this!

Re:Whose Brain??

[Anonymous Coward]

Abby somebody...

Re:This will just allow those...

[zenlessyank]

Smoke a fattie and get an instant force field that will protect your mind......Off Topic-- Nice to comment again...Soo many mod points, whipslash. I use them so sparingly it was hard to use them all...Did I just say that??!! THANKS for the extra points anyways though. I will 'figure' out how to distribute them more, at least until my karma dies again ;)

An interesting corollary to ponder...

[transami]

If this approach does bare fruit (and I tend to think it will even if it requires some years yet of innovation), applying Mores law would mean we will have machines with the same number of neurons and connections as the human brain in about 30 years, and in less than 50 years such a machine will exceed the neural capacity of all humans on the planet.

Re:An interesting corollary to ponder...

[DNS-and-BIND]

You don't know what Moore's Law means. You need to stop using it in your writing.

Re:An interesting corollary to ponder...

[phantomfive]

applying Mores law would mean we will have machines with the same number of neurons and connections as the human brain in about 30 years

I'd love to see how you came up with this estimate.

"span the width of Manhattan"?

[jeffb (2.718)]

I did a double-take at that -- it just didn't sound plausible. But, sure enough, Manhattan is just a couple of kilometers wide, and a kilometer is a million millimeters. If there are millions of axons passing through that cubic millimeter of cortex, that's about how far the segments would stretch in total.

Re:"span the width of Manhattan"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, not knowing the width of manhattan, made the whole declaration useless to me.

Re:"span the width of Manhattan"?

[Quirkz]

It told me it was somewhat longer than my small intestine, and somewhat shorter than my daily commute. In between, I'm not sure I'm really impressed/concerned/informed by knowing the sum length of my neurons.

Good luck with that

[Anonymous Coward]

Above all else, the issue with mapping the brain is how individual each brain is wired. Sure we've made some strides in locating general areas of activity based on our best guesses from blood flow mapping, electrode stimulation and lesion case studies but actually identifying what group of neurons does what in your conscious brain is one of those needle-in-a-haystack approaches.

Re:Good luck with that

[Anonymous Coward]

Above all else, the issue with mapping the brain is how individual each brain is wired. Sure we've made some strides in locating general areas of activity based on our best guesses from blood flow mapping, electrode stimulation and lesion case studies but actually identifying what group of neurons does what in your conscious brain is one of those needle-in-a-haystack approaches.

You are right, we need to bring a big magnet to the haystack.

Good News, Good Use of Public Funding

[slacka]

Nice to hear the government is doing some good with my taxes instead of wasting them bombing wedding on the other side of world. When I was in school, I took some AI classes and my prof had no interest in the biological neurons. Machine Learning has made some great progress, but it's still just a bag of specialized tricks. They're too brittle and don't generalize well. If we're going to ever develop a true artificial general intelligence, we're going to have to model it after our neocortex. This is a good start.

Re:Good News, Good Use of Public Funding

[narcc]

If we're going to ever develop a true artificial general intelligence, we're going to have to model it after our neocortex. This is a good start.

A good start? They've been at that for ~40 years. We're still at the 'poke it with a stick' phase. Color me skeptical.

Re:Good News, Good Use of Public Funding

[chthon]

50 years even. I have at home an issue of an old electronics magazine. It is from 1965, because it iintroduces the compact cassette.

In this magazine is also a schematic from an electronic neuron, built around a single transistor.

Re:Good News, Good Use of Public Funding

[Anonymous Coward]

If we're going to ever develop a true artificial general intelligence, we're going to have to model it after our neocortex. This is a good start.

A good start? They've been at that for ~40 years. We're still at the 'poke it with a stick' phase. Color me skeptical.

Better than anything an Idiot like Narcc can come up with other than a lot of guff on /. that results in his getting his ass handed to him in front of the crowd, and behind the scenes his mother taking his internet privileges away for another 4 months, him throwing a fit and sticking a remote control up his butt while being videotaped by his little brother. All while screaming "I HATE MY LIFE! I HATE MY LIFE!"

Narcc is an idiot who constantly comments on shit that he has no fucking clue about.. with an arrogant attitude and poor spelling and grammar. Typical troll on /,

He gets his ass handed to him on here quite a lot and it is sometimes funny to watch, most of the time though it is just sad.

Re:Good News, Good Use of Public Funding

[SuricouRaven]

The sticks are getting more sophisticated. Progress is painfully slow, but still progress.

Scary as hell

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, aren't you guys a LITTLE bit scared? Lets say this full dive to artificial brains actually works this time- and one of these times, it will- what is to stop us the guys with artificial slaves that are smarter than us and stronger than us from just taking control? We don't have the legal system set up to stop this, right? We don't even have a reason to believe they just want to rule us- what value do we offer them?

Re:Scary as hell

[Anonymous Coward]

This scenario has been discussed many times. Including "2184" and others. The topic is boring.

AI Research is broken

[AK Marc]

They are working at building a brain. That would be like tasking the Ancient Roman Empire with replacing Chariots with electric cars, when they don't have any of the pieces necessary.

You aren't born knowledgable, but every AI works hard at starting from a base of knowledge. You aren't born with rules and constraints, yet every AI puts them in.

The brain is not a computer. The brain is composed of 90 Billion dumb computers that interact. Though AI wasn't powerful to follow that when Neural Nets were tried and failed (and aimed at strong AI). So then we moved on to Machine Learning (which aimed at weak AI, and has been largely successful, but has no real path to Strong AI).

Now that we have more computing devices and better ones, we need to go back to Neural Nets and build a thinking machine, not a smart machine. We are aiming for the human replacement, without even making a computer as smart as a plant. We are Romans claiming success with the electric car because we just discovered electricity, while not having solved any of the other issues.

Artificial Intelligence? Show me some natural intelligence first.

Re:AI Research is broken

[Anonymous Coward]

NVIDIA is doing something concrete to solve this. Their latest half precision chip puts the computation power in the hands of the masses to test hypothesis. When "The Master Algorithm" is finally discovered, it will probably have as much "dumb luck meets law of large numbers" as it has "inspired genius" at work.

In the meantime, I'm going to continue having fun playing with Reinforce.JS because it's smart enough for the problems I want to solve. Training a neural network like you train a pet dog is a paradigm I can comprehend and is much less tedious than building labeled datasets for supervised learning methods.

Re:AI Research is broken

[Anonymous Coward]

You have zero knowledge of the field and are summarizing badly written press releases at best. Neural networking hasn't failed, it IS machine learning.

Re:AI Research is broken

[Anonymous Coward]

A thousand times this ^^ WTF is he talking about? The difference between "smart computers" and "learning machines"?

Why not use bleach and a light microscope?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a better way to do it, and it could potentially image the whole brain, all at once. It can image whole brains of mice and other smaller mammals at the neuronal level, and we can tag each type of brain cell automatically.

Once you've got the raw data a simple AI program could map the structure logically by recognizing the tracers and plotting the connections...

Of course, this cheap and simple method may not put money in the right pockets. See what I'm thinking?

Re:Why not use bleach and a light microscope?

[SuricouRaven]

Imaging is only the first step. The real problem is making sense of the data you get.

Re:Why not use bleach and a light microscope?

[religionofpeas]

Imaging also doesn't get you the details about interconnection strengths.

Re:Why not use bleach and a light microscope?

[Anonymous Coward]

While awesome, CLARITY even at the diffraction limit doesn't have high enough spatial resolution to resolve synaptic connections with certainty. It's good for following big wires, but not necessarily the every little one that the program is hoping to understand on a large scale for the first time. The hype about revolutionizing AI kind of detracts from genuinely groundbreaking neuroscience that is happening.

Re:Why not use bleach and a light microscope?

[SuricouRaven]

There won't be much left of connections after CLARITY is done. If you want that, I think the only way you're getting it is measuring activity in a living brain. Time to crack open some rodents and wire them up.

Re:Why not use bleach and a light microscope?

[religionofpeas]

Time to crack open some rodents and wire them up.

I wonder how many Manhattans of wire that would take.

how much money

[phantomfive]

In case anyone was wondering how much they got for this project, it's part of a $100million NIH project.

MICRONS = worst acronym ever...

[Anonymous Coward]

What is it supposed to be, Machine IntelligenCe fROm cortical NetworkS?

#lame

Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[Viol8]

There are 7 billion people and counting on this planet - why do we need a build a poor electronic fascimile of a human when we have so many real brains here? This is nothing more than ego on the part of the researchers.

And before someone quotes the industrial revolution at me - that replaced physical strength, something that humans even compared to other animals are poor at. However we are exceptionally good at thinking (as a species , not necessaily per individual) so other than the glory of the people involved I see absolutely no reason to remake the human brain in electronic form. There are a large number of reasons not to however.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[Anonymous Coward]

> why do we need a build a poor electronic fascimile of a human when we have so many real brains here?

possibly because most, if not all of those brains might object to being wired up to industrial control processes and made to regulate the temperature of a foundry, twenty-four seven, for however long the factory lasts.

what's that, little AI you object to it also? shut up and regulate, or we'll put you in an iPhone.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[The Real Dr John]

We already have thermostats and controllers. They don't have to act like a human brain, and in fact, they shouldn't act like a human brain that might get distracted or confused. There is absolutely no need to make controllers more "brain like", but the meme has been put out there by Hollywood, so you get people wasting time like this. Mapping the brain is critical to understanding better how it works, but trying to make computers act more like brains is just not a sound scientific concept. Brains and computers do different types of tasks well.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[religionofpeas]

but trying to make computers act more like brains is just not a sound scientific concept.

You may not think it's useful, but there's nothing unscientific or unsound about it. It's a matter of understanding how the brain works, and throwing enough hardware at it to duplicate the essential operations.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[The Real Dr John]

You will need to make it out of nerve cells and glia then, because silicon won't cut it.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[religionofpeas]

You will need to make it out of nerve cells and glia then, because silicon won't cut it.

Just like air planes need to be made from bone, muscle and feathers, because otherwise they won't fly ? Seriously, what's so special about nerve cells that we can't duplicate on a functional level ? And how do you know that to be true ?

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[Anonymous Coward]

He's obviously religious. Many people have a religious belief that there's something special about thinking with meat.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[The Real Dr John]

I love it when engineers try and tell biologists how biology works. But please, be my guest and try and make a brain out of silicon. I am a neuroscientist by profession, and I and many neuroscientists outside of the cognitive neuroscience subfield say that if you want to make something that works like a brain, you will need to do it with wet-ware, not hardware. But I am not discouraging you from trying. Give it a shot and get back to us biologists in a couple decades with your results.

Why can't you do it? Because there are far too many things happening at too small a scale to even measure, let alone imitate. The unknowns in neurosicence far outnumber the knowns. Just like you can't make an artificial bird that can move and fly exactly like a real bird (even though you can make planes and drones) you can't make a brain out of hardware. Let me know when your planes and drones can reproduce sexually.

You can model certain brain functions with software to see what happens if you alter inputs to a neural circuit, but it will only be as good as weather predictions done in silico.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[Viol8]

"Just like air planes need to be made from bone, muscle and feathers, because otherwise they won't fly "

You might want to compare the efficiencies and aeronautic abilities of aircraft vs birds.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[religionofpeas]

Because there are far too many things happening at too small a scale to even measure, let alone imitate. The unknowns in neurosicence far outnumber the knowns.

Take an intel Core i7 in a time machine, and drop it on someone's desk in the 60's. Ask him to imitate it. You'll probably get the same reply.

You can model certain brain functions with software to see what happens if you alter inputs to a neural circuit, but it will only be as good as weather predictions done in silicon.

Irrelevant. The reason we can't do good weather predictions is because weather is chaotic by nature.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[religionofpeas]

You might want to compare the efficiencies and aeronautic abilities of aircraft vs birds.

That may be interesting, but that's not really the point. I'm not arguing that aircraft and birds are equivalent, rather that they can both fly, even though very smart people once claimed that machines would never be able to do that. Now, other smart people are saying machines will never be able to think. And the only argument is from incredulity.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[Anonymous Coward]

"Just like air planes need to be made from bone, muscle and feathers, because otherwise they won't fly "

You might want to compare the efficiencies and aeronautic abilities of aircraft vs birds.

This!

This is where your friendly neighborhood slashdot troll named Narcc needs to step up and pay attention.

Show me a bird that can fly at mach 1 or even a fraction there of and he will see where his trolling falls down.

Point is that machines and biology accomplish the same jobs through different processes.

This will not stop our little wow freakout kid from trolling slashdot though. Sad.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[The Real Dr John]

So why hasn't it been done? And what makes you think that weather is more chaotic than neural activity? What you are saying is coming from a lack of knowledge about how the brain works. You know why? Because neuroscientists don't know why either, and they spend all day studying it. You can't imitate something that you don't understand. Understand?

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[religionofpeas]

Imagine throwing that i7 on somebody's desk in the 60's, and asking them 30 or 40 years later why it's not been duplicated yet. Nobody's denying that the brain is big and complicated, and duplicating the essential functions will take a lot of resources and certain level of technology that we don't have yet. However, there's no indication that there's anything that's impossible by principle.

And what makes you think that weather is more chaotic than neural activity?

Even if neural activity is chaotic, that only means we can't perform the same thing as a brain with 100% accuracy. But that's okay, because it also means that your own brain can never perform the same task again with 100% accuracy, and that is rarely a problem.

You can't imitate something that you don't understand. Understand?

That's not true. See genetic algorithms for instance.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[rolias]

Because a lot of tasks are painfully boring for a human to work on, and computers don't care. Computers that emulate some human ability, like neural networks, can be improved on by using more accurate models than the old neural networks. They still have many useful applications, despite being based on simplistic or incorrect models of how real neurons behave. You don't need a full human mind emulation to do useful work. Though, this is one small step in that direction.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[The Real Dr John]

Like I said, good luck. People have been trying for decades, and haven't gotten anywhere near emulating brain activity in silico. I am not saying people shouldn't try, They will discover all sorts of interesting things along the way, but they will not come up with anything like brain activity in a computer.

Your plane analogy was good, they don't reproduce, they don't flap their wings, they can turn on a dime in mid air with a flip of their wings, and they can't land on a tree branch. They can't build nests or nurture their young, They aren't alive, so they don't do the same things, other than "fly". That is not making an artificial bird, that is making a plane that flies people around. They are not even slightly the same.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[Viol8]

Even insects appear to get bored so any sufficiently complex neural net may well exhibit similar properties. If you want a mindless automaton that does the same task over and over you're better off with a programmed computer with maybe a tiny neural net for some pattern matching, not a brain simulation which is what these guys are aiming at.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[Anonymous Coward]

Because people consider other people to be unreliable and therefore should be 'obsoleted' and 'replaced' with much more reliable (read as: can be easily controlled) machines -- that you don't have to pay, that don't need sleep or bathroom breaks, and that never complain, or if you do you just shut them down, reload them from read-only memory, and start them up again. Basically, people treat other people like garbage, and like all garbage, are subject to being thrown away.

Also, make no mistake: If the government and the military are involved in this, then the goal is just as likely to be research into 100% controlling of human brains.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[religionofpeas]

That is not making an artificial bird, that is making a plane that flies people around. They are not even slightly the same.

The goal of a plane is to fly. The goal was never to mimic a bird. Similarly, the goal is to make a computer that can do tasks that our brain can do, but we don't have to make it run on ham sandwiches and milk.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[SuricouRaven]

That's easy: You just erase the used net after each computation and copy it back from the known-good state.

I don't think they want a brain simulation, skimming through. It looks more like they want a specialised neural net, but don't know how to build one. So they are mapping a chunk of brain and will try to figure out how it works, and use the knowledge thus gained as a guide for creating specialised artificial networks for visual processing.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[religionofpeas]

Large parts of our brains perform mindless tasks all day without getting bored.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[LetterRip]

Humans thinking is not particularly good, it is actually quite poor compared to a reasonable ideal.

A properly developed AGI will probably be able to solve many problems that are difficult or even impossible for humans to solve.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[Enigma2175]

People have been trying for decades, and haven't gotten anywhere near emulating brain activity in silico.

What about the the Blue Brain Project? They have simulated a complete rat neocortical column in silico, and it reacts to stimuli in the same way as a wetware one does. I don't necessarily think this is the path to human-level AI (evolution often has a lot of unused baggage, simply because a particular mutation didn't reduce fitness) but a working model of a brain (human or rat) would be incredibly beneficial in identifying root causes of neural problems and testing treatments.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[The Real Dr John]

It is a simulation. A pretty good one, but just a simulation. Cortical columns don't work in isolation, and they are microscopic in width. There are vast numbers linked in extremely complex ways in cortex, and that is just neocortex. Then there are the sensory systems, the motor systems, thalamus, hypothalamus, the entire midbrain, and then the hugely complex cerebellar cortex and deep cerebellar nuclei, plus brainstem and spinal cord, not to mention the peripheral nervous system. Then there are the vast fiber pathways that link them all. Simulating one cortical column is about 1 one billionth of the way to simulating the brain.

Simulating the weather on a computer is not making weather, just like simulating a brain in a computer is not going to give you anything like a mind. I applaud people for doing this work, but they should not overstate what they are working towards, and what they can expect to accomplish "in silico".

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[ShanghaiBill]

Like I said, good luck. People have been trying for decades, and haven't gotten anywhere near emulating brain activity in silico.

Except for the ANN that just won a Go tournament. Or the ANNs that can do face recognition, speech recognition, or many other things.

Of course, they can't do everything that a brain can do, but a baby can't run a marathon either.

Deep learning based on sigmoidal belief nets is inspired by the architecture of the brain. Autoencoders are very similar in function to the "mirroring" that occurs in the brain. Silico and vivo are not as different as you believe.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[religionofpeas]

just like simulating a brain in a computer is not going to give you anything like a mind

If you put a computer inside a robot skull, and attach its inputs to sensors and outputs to motor control, the distinction between a real mind and a simulated one disappears. It's just a different form of mapping the same information.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[The Real Dr John]

Sure, that must be how it works. I am sure that it would be a self aware, thinking, feeling robot, because that's what I saw in the movies.

Again, good luck with that. You will need a lot of luck.

Stating something is going to work, and getting something to actually work are very different things.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[The Real Dr John]

So you think that the ANN is thinking like a person does? That would be very interesting considering we have no idea how the brain works.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[religionofpeas]

I am sure that it would be a self aware, thinking, feeling robot

As long as your simulation is good enough, you'll get a good representation of all the things you mentioned, yes.

Stating something is going to work, and getting something to actually work are very different things

I know. But you said it wasn't going to work, so I'm only arguing the first part, not the second.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't imitate something that you don't understand?

yes you can. That's like 90% of what children do.

And if you do it enough and compare where your imitations differ from the real thing you can learn to imitate it better over time.

As to being chaotic, brains probably are a chaotic system, but that only really matters if you want to do useless stuff like predict exactly what a specific brain about which you have imperfect information will do at a given time. It doesn't really prevent you from building a brain that will do what you want in a specified situation or building a class of brains that do useful things in a range of situations. Or even predicting what a barin that yo do have perfect information about will do at a given time.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[religionofpeas]

So you think that the ANN is thinking like a person does?

Probably not, but I also don't think that two human Go players think the same way, so I wouldn't consider it a critical point.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[The Real Dr John]

It won't work if you are trying to make a simulated brain that works like a brain using silicon. It may imitate the brain in superficial ways, but that's about it. I am sure they will make good advancements in computing, but not in artificial minds. They will just be putting imitative lipstick on a hardware simulation.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[The Real Dr John]

Two brains use slightly different neural connections based on their genetics and experience, but comparing those subtle differences to the differences between how a brain functions and how a computer functions is silly. I completely understand that non-biologists, who don't understand biological complexity, can think that making an artificial brain is quite doable. But considering we are decades, if not centuries, away from even sort of understanding how the brain works, I think you are going to have a bit of trouble making an imitation brain using hardware. But please, give it a shot.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[religionofpeas]

It won't work if you are trying to make a simulated brain that works like a brain using silicon. It may imitate the brain in superficial ways, but that's about it.

That's entirely dependent on the accuracy of the simulation, and there's no theoretical limit to that.

But considering we are decades, if not centuries, away from even sort of understanding how the brain works

I don't think we ever will, at least not in detail. I also don't think it's necessary. Nobody understands how the AlphaGo neural net works, but it can still beat the best human players in the world. The net just taught itself, first by looking at examples and then by playing against itself.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[religionofpeas]

I completely understand that non-biologists, who don't understand biological complexity, can think that making an artificial brain is quite doable.

I remember chess grandmasters arguing in the 80's that chess computers would never be able to beat them, unless they found a way to understand how a grandmaster plays, and somehow put that in code. Botvinnik wrote a book in 1984 about how computer programs should formulate long term plans. Now, with modern computer hardware, an expert programmer could write a chess program that would beat those grandmasters, while himself not possessing any more chess knowledge than can be picked up from a beginner's book. It shows that experts in a certain field may not be the best equipped to think outside their box.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[The Real Dr John]

I don't see how that is creating an artificial brain, it is just creating an artificial game playing machine. I find it interesting that you think you can make an artificial version of something without knowing anything about how the original works. That is a fascinating concept.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[The Real Dr John]

Well then you should have an artificial brain completed shortly, right?

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[ShanghaiBill]

So you think that the ANN is thinking like a person does?

At the neuron level, yes, they basically function the same. Brains seem to use an algorithm similar to backpropagation, so "correct" responses lead to strengthened connections, and "incorrect" responses cause connections to be weakened.

That would be very interesting considering we have no idea how the brain works.

That is nonsense. We don't (yet) have a complete model for the brain, be we have far more than "no idea".

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[The Real Dr John]

Brains are biological. Your brain is an organ in your body like your liver is. It requires nutrients, oxygen and a good blood supply. Brains don't use algorithms, computers do. I have been a publishing neuroscientist since the 1980s and I am unequivocally telling you that we don't know how the brain works. Prove me wrong. Get on PubMed and bring up the articles that declare that humans know how the brain works. We haven't got a clue because we don't even know why life is so different from inanimate matter. You really need to take at least a few courses in biology before you talk about it or you risk exhibiting the Dunning Kruger effect.

I hope you devote your life to proving me wrong, and I hope you succeed, because it would be great. It would also be nice if I could teleport to the South Pacific for a quick vacation.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[ShanghaiBill]

You can't imitate something that you don't understand. Understand?

Yes you can. The people that developed Alpha-Go are not particularly good Go players. Yet they created a program that can easily beat its creators. Many systems display emergent properties that are were not planned by the designers.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[Viol8]

Not true - all organic brains require sleep.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how you guys wasted so much time on educating this guy. He clearly has no idea about machine learning, signal processing or how computer works.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. -- Arthur C Clarke

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[Anonymous Coward]

We know who schizophrenics got the idea from... Dont _we_? Eh?

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[Anonymous Coward]

Your point lacks coherence beyond decrying the lack of a "soul". To some extent it boils down to a crisis of faith: can a billion monkeys typing at enough typewriters reproduce the complete works of William Shakespeare? How about 100 billion? Infinite?

If an infinite number of monkeys manage to do it through shear chance: you argue the product is less meaningful than the one produced by William for the same reasons that epistemologists would question the conclusion of a misogynist predicting that Hillary Clinton would make a shitty president? Sure: it's factually correct, but if they came to that conclusion because they hate women does it qualify as knowledge?

Does the massive amount of waste paper produced by the monkeys at typewriters invalidate the legitimacy of their literary accomplishment due to the terrible ratio of good vs. bad outcomes? If a simulated consciousness achieves a convincing reproduction of the human brain through an exhaustive search is it somehow less magical because of the lack of elegance to the approach used to achieve that outcome?

If the simulated mind can produce better results for less money than the authentic article: I believe the altar of capitalism will lean towards discarding the flesh and blood version. Equally useless as the blueprints used to produce the vatican after it's construction.

(I.E.: You don't need to build #2 now that you've produced an acceptable model. Will the architect be outraged if you burn the plans when you're done with construction? Potentially: it is in the architect's nature to cherish his own labor, but the system he works for is only concerned with making buildings: the path used to achieve that doesn't play a factor.)

The uncomfortable reality is that although some of us like to believe that capitalism is a tool used by man in his own service: mankind actually works for it(and will continue to do so until it's been discarded in favor of a better substitute). Ask any former machinist and they'll tell you the purpose of autonomous machines.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. A statistician/Mathematician is best equipped to make arguments on this subject. I appreciate the value that a neuroscientist can bring to the discussion, but asserting that because biologists don't understand how the brain works that Mathematicians cannot achieve the same outcome independently is absurd. MEA electrodes can be used to interrogate the simplistic behavior of neurons. The complexity of their state can be estimated probabilistic over a large enough time frame. It's as outrageous as claiming that an IFFT cannot produce something as complex as music from a series of scalar values of frequency bins. You can, and they do. The only question is will we ever have enough data/processing power to take such a ham fisted approach? DARPA is convinced there is a less expensive way to get there, or is willing to spend money to exclude the idea. You can say it's unfeasible and I would agree with you for the time being. Saying it's "impossible" ignores the large evidence to the contrary.

LSTMs, RNNs, Deep CNNs, DQNs, etc. are all producing the sort of results that are more sophisticated than simpler lifeforms can do through neural activity. To say that tomorrow's DQN won't learn unsupervised data faster than a human baby because it is "impossible" is close minded to say the least.

Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't need to understand how a musket works to make a rail gun.

Questionable assumption

[mugurel]

Understanding how the brain works by modeling one cubic mm of cortical matter? It sounds like: "We want to understand the global ecosystem, and we start by simulating what's happening on this square meter of soil". First of all, there is likely going to be a huge diversity in terms of the structures and behavior of a cubic mm of cortical matter, depending on what part of the brain you look at. Secondly, it is relatively undisputed that the functional behavior of the brain is determined by structures at scales far larger than that cubic mm, which that cubic mm is not going to tell you anything about.

Re:Questionable assumption

[Bengie]

More like "We want to understand super-cluster orbits, and we will start by modeling our solar system".

Mind Uploading

[physburn]

Mind Uploaded comes a little closer. 1 cublic millimeter uploaded. Now they have to scale up by about a million times (1 litre), and we'll have an uploaded human

Re:Mind Uploading

[SuricouRaven]

The first uploaded organism is already done. It's a worm. It actually a composite of several worms - C. elegans has the useful feature of every individual being absolutely identical in cell layout.

Here's the worm having been Matrixed into a simulated body and environment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Interestingly, it swims just fine without neurons. Basic motion seems to be a function of muscle cells alone - the nervous system just determines where to go.

Ass covering exercise

[Anonymous Coward]

So, basically they want to provide a cover story for the global human experimentation program where they've been mapping the brain in such a manner using masers fired at random people from satellites for the last 40 years.

Oh, that and steal more money from the tax payer...

Possible only in 3D

[Anonymous Coward]

"“Now the challenge is to figure out what those wiring rules mean algorithmically,” Tolias said. “What kinds of calculations do they do?”"

This is the failure. The brain is not just a list of functions/algorithms doing specific tasks. When a third dimensions is added, it changes things so much that algorithms are not needed. Algorithms are for 2D (microchips). Neurons work in 3D, meaning it is more than its sums. Neurons have other way to work as well: neurotransmitters, specialized neuron types, inhibition/exhibitions etc. When these are combined with the 3D properties of the brain, a huge number of possible outcomes becomes possible. Without algorithms. Mimicking the brain in 2D will be very hard.

Laying the ground work...

[Alomex]

for another AI winter.

Strong AI:

Our motto is: over-promising and under-delivering since 1951.

Our main algorithm is:

1) Remarkable step on a well defined area in AI is made (e.g. AlphaGo)
2) Issue lots of press releases
3) Claim that single isolated step is proof that all remaining thousands of steps needed are just around the corner
4) Apply for grants/create startups
5) Profit!
6) Ten years later AI winter sets in
7) A few years later, serious AI researchers who have quietly been plodding along make another remarkable step.
8) GOTO 1

They just don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

The human brain doesn't operate strictly on algorithms, it can't be relpicated with math and software. Really, people will always be 'better' in this way. What a delusional waste of cash and time.

Re:They just don't get it

[sabbede]

Why do you say that? It is a physical system, and as such can be described mathematically. An exceedingly complex system, sure, but that doesn't mean it can't be modeled, simulated or replicated.

And consider this - mightn't a sufficiently complex algorithm appear to be non-algorithmic?

Numenta seems to be far along

[Anonymous Coward]

My favourite researchers/company in the AI field is definitely Numenta. They are trying to build a neo-cortex based on mimicking the brain and I really think they make a lot of sense. Go look more at http://numenta.com/learn/

Mammalian vs Human Brain

[littlewink]

We know for instance, that the processing "program" of the MAMMALIAN brain ...

FTFY

A mammalian brain is not necessarily a human brain. It is the human brain we want to model.