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Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain

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Re: Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain

#11

Post by higherpurpose »

gilgoomesh wrote: post #4

> The experiment on simulated human brain activity involved 1.73 billion virtual nerve cells that were connected to 10.4 trillion virtual synapses So... 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than a human brain. From Wikipedia: > One estimate puts the human brain at about 100 billion (10^11) neurons and 100 trillion (10^14) synapses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron#Neurons_in_the_brain Assuming linear scaling, that would…

If it's 2 days that puts us about 26 years (2040) away, compared to the original assumption, which would put us 16 years away (2030), assuming "Moore's Law" continues to happen every 18 months (regardless of whether we'll be able to double the number of transistors per same amount of space anymore or not).

Re: Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain

#15

Post by fragsworth »

forktheif wrote: post #14

If they really were simulating a human brain, that would have some pretty serious moral implications.

I think in the short term, companies that develop these things will behave ethically without any oversight (by making machines "enjoy" what they are doing) because doing something else would be inefficient or counterproductive. Why would you make an expensive thinking machine miserable? Humans that are happy are way more productive - and machines that are based off humans will be as well.

In the long term, if and when these things become mass-produced and cheap, people may want to do terrible things to them, in the same vein as animal torture. That may be when laws get put in place to protect them.

Re: Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain

#16

Post by vehementi »

Ellipsis753 wrote: post #7

Even if this was actually simulating a proper human brain it's still a silly comparison. Even now a modern computer struggles to simulate an old SNES perfectly at full speed. A SNES is vastly slower than a modern computer but the additional cost of emulating something can be very high indeed depending on how accurate you want the simulating to be. A computer is also very general purpose. I'm sure that some custom bui…

I've been running SNES emulators for a decade at full performance. What are you referring to?

Re: Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain

#17

Post by jackmoore »

vehementi wrote: post #16
Ellipsis753 wrote: post #7

Even if this was actually simulating a proper human brain it's still a silly comparison. Even now a modern computer struggles to simulate an old SNES perfectly at full speed. A SNES is vastly slower than a modern computer but the additional cost of emulating something can be very high indeed depending on how accurate you want the simulating to be. A computer is also very general purpose. I'm sure that some custom bui…

I've been running SNES emulators for a decade at full performance. What are you referring to?

He was referring to accurate emulation, rather than the approximate emulator you get with a normal emulator. Here's a related story: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...

Re: Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain

#18

Post by davea37 »

vehementi wrote: post #16
Ellipsis753 wrote: post #7

Even if this was actually simulating a proper human brain it's still a silly comparison. Even now a modern computer struggles to simulate an old SNES perfectly at full speed. A SNES is vastly slower than a modern computer but the additional cost of emulating something can be very high indeed depending on how accurate you want the simulating to be. A computer is also very general purpose. I'm sure that some custom bui…

I've been running SNES emulators for a decade at full performance. What are you referring to?

Probably this: "It doesn't take much raw power to play Nintendo or SNES games on a modern PC; emulators could do it in the 1990s with a mere 25MHz of processing power. But emulating those old consoles accurately—well, that's another challenge entirely; accurate emulators may need up to 3GHz of power to faithfully recreate aging tech." - http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...
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