Sunday, April 29th 2007
BlueGene Simulates half a mouse brain
IBM's supercomputer Blue Gene/L has been used to run a 'cortical simulator' as complex as half of a mouse brain. The researchers say that their work has shown characteristics of thought patterns observed in real mouse brains, and are now working on improving the simulation to allow it to run faster in order to make it more neurobiologically faithful. Blue Gene/L is one of four Blue Gene projects in development and is the fastest computer in the world with a theoretical peak of 360 TFLOPS. Using 4,096 processors, each with 256MB of memory, the team managed to create a virtual mouse brain that had 8,000 neurons with up to 6,300 synapses each. Real mouse brains will have about 16,000 neurons which can have up to 8,000 synapses (connections with other nerve fibres) each.
Source:
BBC News
28 Comments on BlueGene Simulates half a mouse brain
Edit: although, seriously, this bodes GREAT for us, if we can shrink these down to implant sized they can help brain damaged individuals, or even allow us to have "skill" implants (sorta like eve-online)
edit: some pics
www.rug.nl/rc/diensten/system_services/nieuwsbrief/200504/bouwbluegene-buildup-800x571.jpg
www.fz-juelich.de/zam/index.php?path=ibm-bgl%2Fconfiguration&index=2016&print=1
www.computerbase.de/bild/news/14042/1/
that computers will surpass the human brain in 2027 or something.
I tried looking for this online and all I found this:
"Nevertheless, we can imagine this hypothetical future point in time given by the population model and Extropians call it the Singularity. A "singularity" is a break in the continuity of something, like a sudden jump in the value of a function, or a black hole, a place where the laws of General Relativity break down. The "singularity" anticipated by Extropians will occur around the year 2027, and it represents a point in our future beyond which we cannot make any predictions of what life will be like. That is the extent of the transformation that Extropians imagine.
This number 2027 is actually an average of several different predictions, of which the population model is one example. There are several other measures of human development or progress that also seem to predict an infinite value or some other sort of paradox, and remarkably they all predict a point in time about 30 years in the future. It is the belief of the Extropians that this coincidence is actually the result of a common cause, that the human race is indeed headed towards a sudden transformation of some kind.
If you take the rate of increase in computer speed (which is an exponential function) and extrapolate forward to the year when an average-priced home computer will be powerful enough to simulate a human brain through explicit modeling of all the neurons, you get 2025. If the necessary software has been developed too (an almost-certainty) then we'll be dealing with the slavery debate all over again.
Occurrance of major "revolutions" in human potential: "
Kind of relates to it but im not sure. Im not an extropianist nor do I know enough about computers.
Article found here home.earthlink.net/~mrob/pub/extropianism.html
Also seems that some movies/stories use the year 2027, interesting:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2027#2027_in_fiction
"The human brains consists of more than 100 billion neurons (nerve cells) through which the brain's commands are sent in the form of electric pulses. These pulses travel at more than 400 km/h (250 mph), creating enough electricity to power a lightbulb. The brain consumes more energy than any other organ, burning up a whopping one-fifth of the food we take in.
It is estimated that the mental capacity of a 100-year old human with perfect memory could be represented by computer with 10 to the power of 15 bits (one petabit). At the current rate of computer chip development, that figure can be reached in about 35 years. However, that represents just memory capacity, not the extremely complex processes of thought creation and emotions.
But consider this: for all the complexity of the brain, you still have only one thought at a time. Make it a positive thought."
www.didyouknow.org/brains.htm
"Skynet has become self-aware" :p.
Oh wait...