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New $1.6B supercomputer project will attempt to simulate the human brain

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Re: New $1.6B supercomputer project will attempt to simulate the human brain

#71

Post by [deleted] »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #54
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #32

I get it, its interesting to understand our intelligence. But model a human brain? Why? Its pretty cheap to make them (and fun). They don't work all that well in the end - they're all bound up with food and sex and fear. Why not be even a little ambitious, and make something an order smarter? The human brain size is arbitrarily bound by the female pelvis size. Presumable the artifical one won't have that limit. And s…

The size of the brain is also bound by the huge amount of calories it consumes, and by how delicate it is. 5 minutes without oxygen? Boom, the organ you spent 20 years grooming is gone. Have the munchies? With your brain burning up to 30% of your calories, it may be the culprit.

[deleted]

Re: New $1.6B supercomputer project will attempt to simulate the human brain

#72

Post by JoeAltmaier »

adrianhoward wrote: post #66
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #32

I get it, its interesting to understand our intelligence. But model a human brain? Why? Its pretty cheap to make them (and fun). They don't work all that well in the end - they're all bound up with food and sex and fear. Why not be even a little ambitious, and make something an order smarter? The human brain size is arbitrarily bound by the female pelvis size. Presumable the artifical one won't have that limit. And s…

I get it, its interesting to understand our intelligence. But model a human brain? Why? Its pretty cheap to make them (and fun). They don't work all that well in the end - they're all bound up with food and sex and fear. Because we still don't understand the human brain in many, many, many ways. Building a model of it and comparing that model to reality is going to help us better understand the human brain. That, in…

Its really, really complicated too. Much of it is incidental to our evolutionary path. Simulating that is like, well, simulating all the cruft stuck to a piece of toast once you dropped it on the floor? Figure out anything at all about a human brain, like thinking for instance, you can skip the cruft and still have a monumental achievement.

In fact, the temptation to do that will be enormous. That's why the whole project seems fishy to me. Obviously simulating a subset is easier than the whole; any subset is pretty much a huge win; why are they talking about simulating it all? Sounds pie-in-the-sky.

Re: New $1.6B supercomputer project will attempt to simulate the human brain

#73

Post by coldarchon »

kanzure wrote: post #62
mbq wrote: post #58

I have a feeling that this is like an attempt to simulate a SOC computer on a quantum physics level based on a blurry microscope image of it in hope to play minesweeper on that. Basic principles (neuron behaviour) are hell of a complex and we must do a lot of dangerous simplifications, we know nothing about the firmware (pre-wiring given by the evolution of our species), finally the software will be completely missin…

> we know nothing about the firmware (pre-wiring given by ... Huh? That's what they are studying.

Impossible. How do they know which area humans use to compute math? We know it because there are people with epilepsy when hearing a math problem. How could we achieve that knowledge with a computer?

Re: New $1.6B supercomputer project will attempt to simulate the human brain

#74

Post by mbq »

kanzure wrote: post #62
mbq wrote: post #58

I have a feeling that this is like an attempt to simulate a SOC computer on a quantum physics level based on a blurry microscope image of it in hope to play minesweeper on that. Basic principles (neuron behaviour) are hell of a complex and we must do a lot of dangerous simplifications, we know nothing about the firmware (pre-wiring given by the evolution of our species), finally the software will be completely missin…

> we know nothing about the firmware (pre-wiring given by ... Huh? That's what they are studying.

This would require dissecting newborns, so I doubt it. Anyway my point was that it is better to approach strong AI by improving and connecting silicon-based ML methods than to put huge amount of power and effort into imperfect neural abstraction hoping that it will automatically become concious.

Re: New $1.6B supercomputer project will attempt to simulate the human brain

#75

Post by kanzure »

mbq wrote: post #74
kanzure wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we know nothing about the firmware (pre-wiring given by ... Huh? That's what they are studying.

This would require dissecting newborns, so I doubt it. Anyway my point was that it is better to approach strong AI by improving and connecting silicon-based ML methods than to put huge amount of power and effort into imperfect neural abstraction hoping that it will automatically become concious.

> imperfect neural abstraction hoping that it will automatically become concious.

Consciousness is not the goal. What if your idea of consciousness is wrong? Even Wikipedia admits that nobody knows what consciousness is.

Re: New $1.6B supercomputer project will attempt to simulate the human brain

#76

Post by kanzure »

adrianhoward wrote: post #65
kanzure wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as I understand, we simply do not understand neuron activity at > a low level enough to make such a thing feasible. Henry Markram has always been adamant that there are enough details already discovered and put into the neurophysiology journals. Of course, now you have to fish that data out and into some usable format. http://channelpedia.epfl.ch/ionchannels http://www.neuroml.org/

Henry Markram has always been adamant that there are enough details already discovered and put into the neurophysiology journals. Of course, now you have to fish that data out and into some usable format. I would tend to disagree. For example as recently as ten years ago everybody knew that most of the computation was implicit in the neural connectivity of the synapses. We now know that there is significant computati…

I think it's a big jump to say that what I said is the same as saying (as you put your interpretation of my comment) "there are no new things to talk about". Besides, if you were to just assume that there's no details available, then you will never aggregate them. But the reality is that there is a great deal of detail in the literature, which can be used to build (even incomplete) models. You could even look at the model to help inform the toiling grad students which neurons to poke at more.

Also, thanks for the paper. do you have others.

Re: New $1.6B supercomputer project will attempt to simulate the human brain

#77

Post by mbq »

kanzure wrote: post #75
mbq wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would require dissecting newborns, so I doubt it. Anyway my point was that it is better to approach strong AI by improving and connecting silicon-based ML methods than to put huge amount of power and effort into imperfect neural abstraction hoping that it will automatically become concious.

> imperfect neural abstraction hoping that it will automatically become concious. Consciousness is not the goal. What if your idea of consciousness is wrong? Even Wikipedia admits that nobody knows what consciousness is.

Ok, bad wording. s/become concious/acquire some higher functions of human brain/g

Re: New $1.6B supercomputer project will attempt to simulate the human brain

#78

Post by JohnIdol »

Retric wrote: post #44
tgflynn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a reference ? Do these worms exhibit non-trivial behavior or is it at the level of say reflex attraction to light sources ?

Sort of. There are only 302 neurons in a nematode, but knowing what weights to put on each of them is an issue. PS: Not mine but this looks like a good summery. http://www.jefftk.com/news/2011-11-02

Actually if you read that link carefully - complete (or even complex) nematode behavior has never been simulated. Different teams have simulated different traits of behavior such as reaction to pokes on the head, non-spontaneous sinusoidal locomotion (there are different kinds of nematode locomotion triggered by the viscosity of the environment). Nothing resembling a learning nematode, indistinguishable from the real thing in terms of behavior, has ever been achieved (unfortunately).

Re: New $1.6B supercomputer project will attempt to simulate the human brain

#79

Post by emsimbeen1 »

martinced wrote: post #3

"...an international group of researchers has secured $1.6 billion..." An international group of researchers has scammed $1.6 billion away. And that's with EU taxpayers money. Do you really think that anyone involved in deciding to allow that kind of spending has any idea as to where we're at nowadays regarding AI? Did any of them read "On Intelligence" (its author knowing more than a thing or two about AI)? I'm sure…

The Human Brain Project's aim is not to create AI - its primary aim is to create a detailed simulation of the Human Brain through big-data integration - in other words through extensive integration of already published data and through integration of strategically selected new-experiments. It is trying to tease out the 'rules' upon which the human brain is built. It has been shown by Henry Markram and his crew that there are in fact rules, which can be simulation, and can explain a great deal of things that would take literally thousands and thousands of experiments - see his connectome paper for an example of how they can predict the connectivity between neurons with a high accuracy - http://www.frontiersin.org/blog/The_Emergent_Connectome/66. The Human Brain Project is composed of a great deal of leading scientists from around the world and their institutions. Do you really think these people (some of which are nobel laureates) are less clued up than the author of "on intelligence". The most pertinent thing to get across here is that the HBP is not an AI project. It is a recreation of the human brain through biophysically accurate models.
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