Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by BeauHD on from the government-funded-projects dept.

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.

69 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. If you want to avoid religious issues by fustakrakich · · Score: 2

    Stay away from the right parietal lobe...

    --
    “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
  2. Pure delusion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

    1. Re:Pure delusion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      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.

    2. Re:Pure delusion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

    3. Re:Pure delusion by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    4. Re:Pure delusion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:Pure delusion by mugurel · · Score: 2

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

    6. Re:Pure delusion by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      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.

    7. Re:Pure delusion by sabbede · · Score: 1

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

  3. Whose Brain?? by zenlessyank · · Score: 1

    Very important factor.

  4. "span the width of Manhattan"? by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:"span the width of Manhattan"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

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

    2. Re:"span the width of Manhattan"? by Quirkz · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
  5. Good News, Good Use of Public Funding by slacka · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Good News, Good Use of Public Funding by narcc · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Required reading for internet skeptics
    2. Re:Good News, Good Use of Public Funding by chthon · · Score: 1

      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.

    3. Re:Good News, Good Use of Public Funding by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

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

  6. Re:An interesting corollary to ponder... by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 3, Informative

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

    --
    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
  7. AI Research is broken by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    Learn to love Alaska
  8. Why not use bleach and a light microscope? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Why not use bleach and a light microscope? by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

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

    2. Re:Why not use bleach and a light microscope? by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

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

    3. Re:Why not use bleach and a light microscope? by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

      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.

    4. Re:Why not use bleach and a light microscope? by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      Time to crack open some rodents and wire them up.

      I wonder how many Manhattans of wire that would take.

  9. Re:An interesting corollary to ponder... by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  10. how much money by phantomfive · · Score: 1

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

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  11. Better yet - stay away from both lobes by Viol8 · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by The+Real+Dr+John · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
    2. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

      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.

    3. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by The+Real+Dr+John · · Score: 1

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

      --
      A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
    4. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

      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 ?

    5. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by The+Real+Dr+John · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
    6. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by Viol8 · · Score: 1

      "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.

    7. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

      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.

    8. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      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.

    9. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by The+Real+Dr+John · · Score: 1

      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?

      --
      A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
    10. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by religionofpeas · · Score: 2
      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.

    11. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by rolias · · Score: 1

      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.

    12. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by The+Real+Dr+John · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
    13. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by Viol8 · · Score: 1

      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.

    14. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

      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.

    15. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

      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.

    16. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

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

    17. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by LetterRip · · Score: 1

      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.

    18. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by Enigma2175 · · Score: 1

      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.

      --

      Enigma

    19. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by The+Real+Dr+John · · Score: 1

      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".

      --
      A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
    20. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      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.

    21. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      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.

    22. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by The+Real+Dr+John · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
    23. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by The+Real+Dr+John · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
    24. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      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.

    25. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      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.

    26. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by The+Real+Dr+John · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
    27. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by The+Real+Dr+John · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
    28. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      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.

    29. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

      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.

    30. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by The+Real+Dr+John · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
    31. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by The+Real+Dr+John · · Score: 1

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

      --
      A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
    32. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      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".

    33. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by The+Real+Dr+John · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
    34. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      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.

    35. Re:Better yet - stay away from both lobes by Viol8 · · Score: 1

      Not true - all organic brains require sleep.

  12. Questionable assumption by mugurel · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Questionable assumption by Bengie · · Score: 1

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

  13. Mind Uploading by physburn · · Score: 1

    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

    1. Re:Mind Uploading by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

      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.

  14. Laying the ground work... by Alomex · · Score: 1

    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

  15. Mammalian vs Human Brain by littlewink · · Score: 1

    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.

  16. Re:They just don't get it by sabbede · · Score: 1
    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?