When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998) • Hacker News Board

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#181

Post by sdwr » Wed, Apr 24, 2024, 3:31 PM UTC

butlike wrote: post #176

hax0ron3 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also blows my mind that that, even though DNA seems to just code for proteins and does not store a schematic for a brain in any way that we've been able to decipher so far, human eggs pretty reliably end up growing into people who 9 months after conception already have a bunch of stuff, including visual processing, working. Of course the DNA is not the only input, there is also the mother's body, the whole process…

I'm thinking out loud here, but what if it's akin to a copy mechanism, or compression expander algorithm like unzipping a file? The Sperm carries the requisite DNA to activate the egg, which then just executes the body's Replicate() method. The sperm being required is so people don't spontaneously get pregnant. The DNA coding for proteins is just to build the replicate() method, which then starts copying attributes f…

How does IVF work then? Or animals that lay eggs?

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#182

Post by obruchez » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 12:23 PM UTC

sigmoid10 wrote: post #154

atemerev wrote: post #152

At my workplace, we are now completing the multiscale simulation of a full mouse brain (neuron/synaptic activity, cellular metabolism, etc). It fits into our small supercomputer first deployed in 2019, and there's a large potential for simplification not yet realized. I believe that a supercomputer from the top 5 can already simulate a human brain. But we don't have the data and the theory yet. We are developing it,…

Are you talking about real time or faster simulation of complete cellular metabolism incl. neural activity across an entire mouse brain? If not, then I'd say I can run a simulation like this on my home computer. It will just take forever to compute something meaningful. But if yes, that is insanely impressive, even though this won't scale to the human brain any time soon since it has 1000x more neurons and exponentia…

He's working on the Blue Brain Project, apparently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#183

Post by Balgair » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 2:07 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #177

Balgair wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main issue is that we're lacking one of the four fundamental circuit components: the memristor [0]. If we had a simple, throw it in a box for five years, stable memristor, we'd have everything we'd need for brain modeling. Being as a memristor is effectively a synapse. With that, we would want to do everything in the analog domain anyways. [0] the other three are the resistor, the capacitor, and the inductor.

We have them now, on chips and everything.

Woah, where?!

I can't seem to find anything on memristors being on chip or really being in solid state anything.

I would love to get my hands on them!

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#184

Post by jiggawatts » Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 10:35 AM UTC

Balgair wrote: post #183

jiggawatts wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have them now, on chips and everything.

Woah, where?! I can't seem to find anything on memristors being on chip or really being in solid state anything. I would love to get my hands on them!

A quick Google search will find thousands of articles.

It was possible to buy memristor storage devices, but they weren't sufficiently competitive with ordinary flash memory and I believe they're relegated to niche applications such as high erase counts.

AI implementations on Memristor circuitry has come up often enough that even I've heard of it. E.g.: A random recent development is https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45312-0

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#185

Post by HarHarVeryFunny » Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 5:46 PM UTC

hax0ron3 wrote: post #52

geysersam wrote: post #33

The estimate for how many operations per second the brain does is quite a wild guess. It starts out very reasonable, estimating the amount of information the eyes feed to the brain. But from there on it's really just a wild guess. We don't know how the brain processes visual input, we don't know what the fundamental unit of processing in the brain is, or if there is one.

It also blows my mind that that, even though DNA seems to just code for proteins and does not store a schematic for a brain in any way that we've been able to decipher so far, human eggs pretty reliably end up growing into people who 9 months after conception already have a bunch of stuff, including visual processing, working. Of course the DNA is not the only input, there is also the mother's body, the whole process…

DNA does a lot more than coding for proteins. It also controls how genes are expressed (how same gene does different things in different contexts) and how cells differentiate into different types (neurons, skin, muscle, etc) depending on location.

In this way, DNA does control the blueprint for the brain, down to the initial generic wiring scheme of the cortex - six layers of differentiated neuron types, with a specific pattern of inter-connectivity. As a rough analogy, you could think of this DNA-controlled initial wiring scheme as something like an untrained transformer... the architecture is there, but won't do anything useful until it has been exposed to a lot of data, which will complete the wiring scheme (synapses = brain's model weights).

The brain is going to start to learn as soon as it has sufficiently developed, which is certainly before birth, and newborn babies have been shown to already respond to things like their mothers voice which they were exposed to in the womb.

Intelligence - ability to learn - is different from knowledge. A newborn baby has very little knowledge, but it does have intelligence since that comes from the brain architecture, hence ability to learn, that our DNA "encodes".

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#186

Post by Balgair » Sun, Apr 28, 2024, 7:10 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #184

Balgair wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah, where?! I can't seem to find anything on memristors being on chip or really being in solid state anything. I would love to get my hands on them!

A quick Google search will find thousands of articles. It was possible to buy memristor storage devices, but they weren't sufficiently competitive with ordinary flash memory and I believe they're relegated to niche applications such as high erase counts. AI implementations on Memristor circuitry has come up often enough that even I've heard of it. E.g.: A random recent development is https://www.nature.com/articles/s…

I've been googling for a while on these, it's the first I've heard of it. Do you have a link at all? Not trying to troll here, I really am genuinely interested.