IBM announces advances toward a computer that works like a human brain
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Re: IBM announces advances toward a computer that works like a human brain
#2I find this a fascinating area of research, however a prediction of my dad's always comes to mind. "A computer as intelligent as a human will take 18 years to 'program.'"
Re: IBM announces advances toward a computer that works like a human brain
#3http://www.modha.org/ has much more detail:
"The model reproduces a number of physiological and anatomical features of the mammalian brain. The key functional elements of the brain, neurons, and the connections between them, called synapses, are simulated using biologically derived models. The neuron models include such key functional features as input integration, spike generation and firing rate adaptation, while the simulated synapses reproduce time and voltage dependent dynamics of four major synaptic channel types found in cortex. Furthermore, the synapses are plastic, meaning that the strength of connections between neurons can change according to certain rules, which many neuroscientists believe is crucial to learning and memory formation. ... We were able to deliver a stimulus to the model then watch as it propagated within and between different populations of neurons. We found that this propagation showed a spatiotemporal pattern remarkably similar to what has been observed in experiments with real brains. In other simulations, we also observed oscillations between active and quiet periods, as is often observed in the brain during sleep or quiet waking."
I'm pretty skeptical about this line of work. The thing that's interesting about neural circuitry is not so much large scale population activity patterns but transformation of information (e.g. construction of a receptive field, place cells in hippocampus). As far as I can tell this work captures some of the large scale oscillatory dynamics but says nothing about the fine-grained information processing that is actually where the rubber meets the road.
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Edit: that said, the tools for large scale computation being developed here could be an interesting foundation for further work -- given the right stimuli and learning rules, can one recapitulate formation of receptive fields? If yes, what would the relationship be between the simulation's implementation of receptive field structure, and the implementations found in biology?
But the media hype is pretty off scale for what is, essentially, preliminary work.
Re: IBM announces advances toward a computer that works like a human brain
#4I find this a fascinating area of research, however a prediction of my dad's always comes to mind. "A computer as intelligent as a human will take 18 years to 'program.'"
Not of it's a computer doing the programming
Re: IBM announces advances toward a computer that works like a human brain
#5A very interesting research but we have to take some aspects into consideration. Computers that can work like or close to a human mind is simply impossible. Human mind keeps on upgrading every time we learn something new while computer can only learn this things through upgrading them by a person who recently learned something new, what if that person dies, then the computer will stop its progress and will no longer be considered to work like a human mind.
Just my point of view.
Re: IBM announces advances toward a computer that works like a human brain
#6I'm always suspicious of anything that people claim "works like the human X". In many cases (the brain especially) we have only the most rudimentary understanding of how things actually work. Our ability to create something that works the same way is therefore only as good as that rudimentary understanding. That said, it's clear they are trying to use this computer to understand more about brains. But whenever I read an article like this, I can't help but think of all those grainy movies of early failed attempts at manned flight by people trying to immitate birds.
Re: IBM announces advances toward a computer that works like a human brain
#7I find this a fascinating area of research, however a prediction of my dad's always comes to mind. "A computer as intelligent as a human will take 18 years to 'program.'"
That may be true, but presumably it could be copied and run in separate instances instantly, just like modern software. That limitation might disappear pretty quickly :)
Re: IBM announces advances toward a computer that works like a human brain
#8I find this a fascinating area of research, however a prediction of my dad's always comes to mind. "A computer as intelligent as a human will take 18 years to 'program.'"
Not of it's a computer doing the programming
If it is programming is it still a computer or is it a programmer?
Computer with a human-like brain seems to be a bit of an oxymoron in that respect.
Re: IBM announces advances toward a computer that works like a human brain
#9quote: "Modha imagines a cognitive computer that could analyze a flood of constantly updated data from trading floors, banking institutions and even real estate markets around the world — sorting through the noise to dentify key trends and their consequences."
... and we'll have at the end a pseudo-human opinion that also will totally fail to see the housing bubble. It will also have opinions about the existence of God, Ginger vs. Marianne, and cry because its haircut turned out poorly.
Re: IBM announces advances toward a computer that works like a human brain
#10I'm always suspicious of anything that people claim "works like the human X". In many cases (the brain especially) we have only the most rudimentary understanding of how things actually work. Our ability to create something that works the same way is therefore only as good as that rudimentary understanding. That said, it's clear they are trying to use this computer to understand more about brains. But whenever I read…
I think you have nailed it. I don't actually think we have a clue as to how the brain actually works. A while ago, we think it is like a telephone exchange, then we think it is like a computer, then we think it is like the cloud. The true advances in interesting computer results comes not from modeling the brain, but more from low-grade mimicking of the evolutionary process.