Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain
1–10 of 48 posts
Re: Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain
#2Actually a shorter amount of time than I was expecting.
Re: Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain
#3What does simulating the human brain mean? Would a simulation lead to artificial intelligence or just quite a large neural network?
Re: Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain
#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 put an actual simulated second of human brain neural activity somewhere between 6 hours and 2 days.
Re: Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain
#5What does simulating the human brain mean? Would a simulation lead to artificial intelligence or just quite a large neural network?
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/
Re: Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain
#6Actually a shorter amount of time than I was expecting.
This article from last summer speaks of 1% of human brain activity:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57597049-1/fujitsu-super...
It also says "The synapses were randomly connected" among other more even handed discussion of what happened.
Re: Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain
#7Even 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 built chips and electronics would be much better at simulating these kinds of networks.
Re: Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain
#8Better 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 integral people on this project):
http://www.nest-initiative.org/index.php/Software:About_NEST
Re: Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain
#9Great, we're only 11 doublings away. By Moore's Law, that means we should have AI ready just in time for it to fix the Year 2038 problem.
Re: Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain
#10What does simulating the human brain mean? Would a simulation lead to artificial intelligence or just quite a large neural network?
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?