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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

#31

Post by ckoepp »

garrettdreyfus wrote: post #10
jds375 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like just a large neural network (which could be of coursed used for AI purposes). More detail is here in the original press release: http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/press/2013/20130802_1/

Hmmm... I wonder If we could record the state of an active brain and "run" it in the computer creating sentience. Without getting theological, what would the difference between the brain and the computer be if they were exact copies and functioned in the same way?

The problem currently is that we actually don't know how the brain works. I know a lot of people claiming that they've found out - but if you dig deeper you'll find most experiments only work in certain cultures and are far from being THE theory which explains everything. I mean nobody today can actually be sure that the power at which a synapse is firing has a meaning. We simply have no idea - it may have significant influence but we're far from proving it (can't find the paper describing this, as I'm not able to connect to the university network currently).

This is bad news - especially for the AI-robotics guys, as they need this knowledge to implement the next generation of smart robots. They hope to get some "self reprogrammable robots" as this is what your brain seems to do all the time.

So what do we technicians do? We're trying to build a machine to simulate a brain (and hope we're right in our assumption how the brain works). There is a huge project like this going on in the EU too [1]. This is the bottom-up approach and it's far from all the press releases as there are too many assumptions in it - even if those guys hate to hear it. There is a nice documentary film with Jospeh Weizenbaum (former professor at MIT and close friend of Chromsky) about this very issue and its ethical aspects [2].

The up-down approach is researched by system biologists (and other related sciences). They aim at the bio-chemical and physical layers to figure out how a brain works and it seems like this is complicated as hell. We're some kind of programmable - even if nobody can tell how far this actually goes. Just being raised in different cultures can have significant influence in how a brain reacts in situations. Even siblings with the same DNA and are being raised within the very same family you can find differences in how their brain reacts...

So don't get too excited about all this - we're far away from being "downloadable". Which is maybe not the worst thing if you're thinking about it for a while. What would life mean if it's endless? And by the way: even if you were downloadable, what tells you that you're still alive if a copy of your brain is stored within an robot? There are hard philosophical questions behind such issues...

[1] https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_%26_Pray

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

#32

Post by XorNot »

ckoepp wrote: post #31
garrettdreyfus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm... I wonder If we could record the state of an active brain and "run" it in the computer creating sentience. Without getting theological, what would the difference between the brain and the computer be if they were exact copies and functioned in the same way?

The problem currently is that we actually don't know how the brain works. I know a lot of people claiming that they've found out - but if you dig deeper you'll find most experiments only work in certain cultures and are far from being THE theory which explains everything. I mean nobody today can actually be sure that the power at which a synapse is firing has a meaning. We simply have no idea - it may have significan…

Well isn't the real hope that we'll get the hardware close enough in capability that one day a learning general AI just kind of pops out of it?

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

#34

Post by kirtijthorat »

One thing we have to understand here is that 1 second of human brain activity is quite a lot of computing! It's not 'just one second'. This incredible experiment shows how the human curiosity has gone so far to build a artificial thinking machine. It would be great to see the compute result of if we could add 10 Supercomputer.

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

#35

Post by biofox »

wazoox wrote: post #33

We still can't properly simulate the puny caenorhabditis elegans brain with some accuracy. Don't hold your breath on this one.

This. And we've had the complete wiring diagram for its brain for over 20 years.

There's a wide-spread assumption that knowing the brain's connectivity will be sufficient to emulate its function, but there's so much about the underlying molecular and electrical properties of neurons that we know nothing about.

It's somewhat analogous to having a circuit diagram where the components are missing. Dropping in random components but preserving the wiring structure won't result in the same functionality.

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

#36

Post by tekni5 »

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 don't think we would need to simulate a human brain 100% to have strong artificial intelligence. Similarly how we don't need to simulate the SNES 100% to be able to enjoy the games.

Furthermore I'm pretty sure a human brain also maintains various bodily functions, which use some percentage of the brain's computational power.

I also suspect that strong AI is probably not as complicated as we think, it's just that no one has thought of the correct set of ideas required for strong AI to emerge.

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

#37

Post by bpicolo »

higherpurpose wrote: post #11
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).

Except Moore's law most likely isn't continuing for much longer, if it hasn't stopped already.

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

#38

Post by NAFV_P »

archgoon wrote: post #8

Better writeup (cites sources!) and discussion from 5 months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157157 And the Riken Lab press release http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/press/2013/20130802_1/ This is a link to the poster presentation. There does not seem to be a full paper associated with this research yet. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/14/S1/P163 The NEST simulator (The researchers Morrison and Diesman are…

I looked up NEST, written in C++ with Python. What, no LISP?

When I hear AI being discussed LISP comes up fairly often. In the book "Meta Maths: The Quest for Omega" by Greg Chaitin, he mentions that Kurt Godel's work had a notation that was uncannily similar to LISP code. On the other paw he compares Turing's idea of code as something more akin to machine code.

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

#40

Post by ExpiredLink »

dTal wrote: post #30
ExpiredLink wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. Simulating your brain != simulating your mind. Don't become a victim of 'neurobollocks'. http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2012/09/your-brain...

Your New Statesman link only talks about pseudoscience and doesn't support your assertion. The mind is an emergent property of the brain. If you can't simulate a mind by simulating a brain, then what in your opinion would it take? Or is it impossible because we all have ineffable souls that the laws of physics mysteriously cannot access?

> The mind is an emergent property of the brain.

This is the kind of pseudo-science that gets so much attention nowadays. Incredible.

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