Aside from the positronic brains you might see in Star Trek's Data or in Isaac Asimov's robots, there are no computer brains that can mimic a human brain. There is, via IBM, a computer that can mimic a cat brain, however.
This week researchers from IBM reported that they have simulated a cat's cerebral cortex. It's not something you can run on your PC at home, however. The supercomputer involved has 147,456 processors and 144 terabytes of main memory. Compare that with a decent Windows based PC that will have one CPU and perhaps 4 GB of memory. One terabyte is approximately 1,000 GB.
These researchers had previously simulated 40 percent of a mouse's brain in 2006, a rat's full brain in 2007, and 1 percent of a human's cerebral cortex earlier this year, using progressively bigger supercomputers. The feline cerebral cortex is obviously the most complex brain they have been able to completely simulate.
There is a catch: the simulation runs at 100x slower than a real cat's brain. The simulation, however, isn't about making a robot version of Felix the Cat, but rather about watching how thoughts are formed and how the roughly 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses in a cat's brain work together.
The supercomputer is at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dharmendra Modha, manager of cognitive computing for IBM Research and senior author of the research paper, believes that if Moore's Law holds, a simulation of a human cortex could come within the next decade. Moore's Law describes an existing long-term trend in the history of computing hardware, in which the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years.
Written by Michael Santo
HULIQ.com
Comment and add to the story without registration, but keep the comments meaningful please. Links are not accepted.
