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The Blue Brain project, a collaboration of IBM and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, in Lausanne, Switzerland, recently simulated the firing of 10,000 neurons in a single column in the neocortex using IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer. It is looking for additional supercomputers to process more data.
Stanford University professor of bioengineering Kwabena Boahen said this week that his team has designed a "neurogrid," a large system using several copies of the same neuromorphic chip that models the different layers and interactions of the brain. He said his two-year goal is to emulate a million neurons in the cortex. (The human brain has an estimated 10 billion neurons, which can be lost as people age.)
Theodore Berger, a professor of biomedical engineering and neurobiology at the University of Southern California, talked about his work developing biomedical electronics that can be used to replace brain damage--tools called implantable biomimetic electronics. He's specifically working on the circuitry of the brain that's responsible for forming long-term memories, called the hypothalamus.
He said the brain processes information in terms of spacio-temporal patterns, meaning it processes information visually in reference to space and time and in a nonlinear fashion. To predict the output of damaged neurons, his work is to develop a history of input and action potentials, or the "input pattern," he said. The end result will be a device that can sit on a patient's head and interact electrochemically with the brain, replacing the damaged piece of the neocortex.
Hawkins' theories also rely on the idea of the brain as a pattern-recognizing machine. He bases his notion on a theory of a common cortical algorithm that underlies all function of the brain, meaning we process playing a game like Scrabble the same way we might learn a language.
"It's dark in there; it's just patterns computed into the brain," Hawkins said. "We have to think about patterns."
In simplest terms, HTM consists of a "hierarchy of causes" from the world, or memory nodes; infers what a cause might be, based on informational input to the machine; predicts the future based on expectations from the causes; then directs motor behavior from the predictions.
Following Hawkins' talk at the conference, someone from the audience expressed doubt about his theories and suggested he "stick with the Treo."
"That's fine," Hawkins replied, "but I'm still going to work on it."
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Also even without the advent of Quantum processors on the scene, there is still going to be a significant increase in processing power. If Moore's Law holds for the next two decades, then your 3 Ghz processor on your desktop will be running around 50 Terahertz in 20 years. A supercomputer on your desk. Now close your eyes and imagine that same computer with the parallelism that quantum computers can offer.
(50 Terahertz) * (1,000,000) = HOLY Petahertz Batman!!!
Anyway, that is 50x10^15 in case anybody was wondering just how many operations per second that is. Which is just one magnitude shy of being able to simulate protein folding in real time. Now string together several thousand of these guys together into one massive cluster and you got one heck of a computer.
Anyway, just something to think about before you go telling us all that 640K of Ram is all we will every need.
Example. A Nano-laser would be needed at an atomic level for implementing this physically. Probably could stimulate the brain in lesser ways though with more bulky equipment. But there needs to be fuzzy reasoning so in some way we would have to use patterns or DNA as a base; as usual.
We mustn't take it too far and we need open standards of course for safety and competition so I am glad they are releasing that program open source.
I just want to sustain my life in a healthy way not upload myself and live in a computer. I want to enhance my life, not hide away in a computer
In Richard Morgans Altered Carbon series book 3, there is a religion that decides uploading (living completely digital) is a perfect way to live but they have to deal with allot moire unknowns and computer viruses that are not the case in real or slower time like now. I think a balance will be needed. That's why I don't want to be on the Internet too much and prefer to keep most of my stuff on the desktop. The Internet is too digital. There's not allot of reality to it. It's easy to say we are in a 'Live' era and not to make decisions for ourselves; so putting everything on the Internet isn't going to happen.
Also the only way to 'upload' or digitally live would be to a have part of it physical and a part digital because we couldn't live in both places. I am not sure how to transfer consciousness.
I am excited about the prospects for neural and spinal repair becaseu I am part of that world too.
We need halp over here.
Go to www.educate yourself.com and start discovering a few things that you really should know.
Dianne
What is actually done in science labs is not always released to the public.
with them since the 50's. What is actually done in science labs is
not always released to the public."
And what you saw on Star Trek and read about in the pamphlet
from the Area 51 UFO abductee convention is not always true. But
maybe I should keep my foil helmet on, just in case.
a child can still do alot better then the most expensive supercomputer.let alot downloading anything into one.
scifi sometimes tells the truth even if it where true like in robocop we would go mad from the experience
When the artificial intelligences begin to arrive in functional forms they are not going to be what we expect. Firstly, genetics has made astronomical gains in the last 2 decades and now stands on the brink of being able to manufacture or radically alter organisms. So there may be an organic component to artificial intelligence that few are really contemplating. It requires only some crossing of social and legal lines rather that tons of extra lab work to set this in motion.
The second important factor is that our military establishment is working diligently on creating semi-intelligent machines to carry out combat missions. This line of development is the most frightening and will advance the fastest because it ignores the problem of imitating human intelligence (which is wrapped up with a lot of complexities like sex, hunger, pain, and other chemical matters that are largely irrelevant to mechanisms) in favor of creating intelligences which are focused on defined tasks. Think of the spider--a marvel of organic evolution whose form of intelligence is so entirely focused on its prey-catching task that we fail to comprehend it as intelligent. The intelligent machines of the military are going in short order to become capable of wresting control of our planet from us, with or without a programmed sense of purpose. Machines that can make and design other machines will also be a threat.
The issue, that Deus and others are not seeing, is that intelligent machines will not threaten or serve us when they have brains like ours: they will be designed for specified purposes and carry them out in complex ways that we can't hope to imitate.