Supercomputer Simulates Human Visual System

An anonymous reader writes "What cool things can be done with the 100,000+ cores of the first petaflop supercomputer, the Roadrunner, that were impossible to do before? Because our brain is massively parallel, with a relatively small amount of communication over long distances, and is made of unreliable, imprecise components, it's quite easy to simulate large chunks of it on supercomputers. The Roadrunner has been up only for about a week, and researchers from Los Alamos National Lab are already reporting inaugural simulations of the human visual system, aiming to produce a machine that can see and interpret as well as a human. After examining the results, the researchers 'believe they can study in real time the entire human visual cortex.' How long until we can simulate the entire brain?"

Just one word...

[KGIII]

Impessive.

Interesting pictures, but...

[RingDev]

Who the hell left colored drop lights laying all over the server room!?

-Rick

Oh, for a second there....

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that supermodels stimulate the human visual system.

Re:Ghost in the supercomputer

[owlnation]

And when this simulation claims to be conscious, what do we make of that?

Simple. We make whatever it tells us to make. Or else.

Let's link thousands of these simulations together

[Daimanta]

And we should call it Skeyenet.

Re:Just one word...

[SupplyMission]

One word? That makes your spelling error rate 100%.

Re:Just one word...

[KGIII]

That's only 10% lower than my math error rate.

Re:The Last Step For Ubiquitous Robotics?

[notgm]

output:

why does christopher lambert show up in all of these historical pictures?

Re:Ghost in the supercomputer

[sgt scrub]

ask if it likes boobies.

Re:New goal...

[spun]

Dude, calm down. I wasn't dissing humanity, by mentioning that mantis shrimp have better vision, okay?

"Hew-mans! Hew-mans! Hew-mans! we're number one! we're number one!"

Feel better now?

Re:New goal...

[spun]

Christ on a fucking pogo stick, another one? What's with people who can't admit that maybe, just maybe, humans aren't the best at everything?

Mantis shrimp don't have a blind spot, because their eyes aren't like the stupid human eyes where the optic nerve attaches to the front! Nyah nyah nyah!

Here's the quote I was referring too:

The visual information leaving the retina seems to be processed into numerous parallel data streams leading into the central nervous system, greatly reducing the analytical requirements at higher levels.

As far as I know, there is only a single data stream per eye in human vision. It may be transmitted in parallel, but there is only one image created for each eye. Not so for the vastly superior mantis shrimp. We have trinocular vision in each eye, so suck it, monkey boy!

I wouldn't, I mean, a mantis shrimp would never consider trading my, I mean his superior eyes for your puny human ones!

Re:New goal...

[CodeBuster]

Yes. Thank you for your cooperation.

Re:New goal...

[blair1q]

They're also very tasty.

Can't help you on the question of their visual ability. Though I'm pretty sure they didn't see the net until it was too late.

I guess I get to really well-stocked sushi bars more often than really well-stocked aquariums.

Re:Oh, this is a fine how do you do

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly, you are also a Twitter sockpuppet sneakily promoting your sockpuppet's parent post which sneakily demoted its sockpuppet's parent post. Well, it will not work, I say. A pox on you!

Re:New goal...

[spun]

Is there any non-delicious shrimp?

Re:New goal...

[spun]

Focal planes? Bah! What do we need with focal planes when we have, essentially, tens of thousands of pinhole cameras and eyes divided into three separate areas. Compared to your fovea, we have multiple bands of high res areas stretching across the middle of our eye! Can you see circularly polarized light? Why, an octopus has better eyesight than a human!

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go stun a herring.

Singularity

[CODiNE]

Heh... what if they finally simulate a human brain and... he's just a normal guy. "Design a better computer for us B.O.B." "Uhhh... I don't even like computers." Or what if it turns out to be stupid? Make it 100x faster and it's just STUPID FAST. :)