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?"

New goal...

[dahitokiri]

Perhaps the goal should be to make the visual system BETTER than ours?

The Singluarity is Near

[Richard.Tao]

It's nice to see progress is being made. It's scary how accurate Ray Kurzwiel's predictions seem to be, he said that by early 2010 we'll have simulated a human brain. (he's a technological analyst and author of "The Singularity is Near"). Todays desktops are faster then the super computers of the 90's. I can't wait till I'm able to get a laptop smarter then me in every way (queue joke about how stupid I am), that'll be a cool time to live in. Seems it's only a matter of decades away. Probably 20 years.

Re:The Singluarity is Near

[4D6963]

It's nice to see progress is being made. It's scary how accurate Ray Kurzwiel's predictions seem to be, he said that by early 2010 we'll have simulated a human brain. (he's a technological analyst and author of "The Singularity is Near"). Todays desktops are faster then the super computers of the 90's. I can't wait till I'm able to get a laptop smarter then me in every way (queue joke about how stupid I am), that'll be a cool time to live in. Seems it's only a matter of decades away. Probably 20 years.

OMG a super computer! It's so powerful it can probably pop up a consciousness of its own!

Sarcasm aside, computer power and strong AI are two very distinct problems. Computer power is all about scaling up power so you can do more in less time, that doesn't allow you to do anything new, only the same things except faster. Strong AI is all about algorithms, and nobody can tell if such algorithms exist. And anyone who talks about human-like strong AI is a crackpot (Kurzwiel is a crackpot to me for his wacky predictions), as we have yet to see a bug-like strong AI, and if it was just a problem of power we'd already have something working in that field.

Re:The Singluarity is Near

[Anonymous Coward]

Strong AI is all about algorithms, and nobody can tell if such algorithms exist.

There are around six billion instances of such algorithms in production today. We know they exist.

And anyone who talks about human-like strong AI is a crackpot

Okay, you're a crackpot.

Vatanen's Peak

[mangu]

How does 'never' sound?

It's funny that if you claim a mountain is impossible to climb they'll name it after you [wikipedia.org]. But try going up that same mountain in ten minutes. [youtube.com] Will they rename it after you? No way...

It's true that we don't know how the human brain works, yet, because we don't have all the needed tools to study it today. A caveman would never be able to understand the workings of a watch, you cannot study a watch stone tools. But each time a supercomputer beats a record we get a better tool to study the inner workings of the human brain.

Re:New goal...

[CodeBuster]

You do realize that such an ocular system, which undoubtedly works well for the limited needs of the shrimp, may have accompanying disadvantages for complex land based life forms such as humans. The human vision system while not optimized for certain specialized uses, such as the aforementioned shrimp, is never the less a very decent general purpose system that has served our species well for eons. It is likely that our current system of vision, especially when compared to the possible trade-offs for increased capabilities (less general intelligence capabilities as more of the brain and nervous system is devoted to complex autonomous image processing for example), is fairly close to optimal given the other constraints of our bodies. Besides, for those situations where a particular aptitude is useful but not always desirable, night vision for example, human intelligence has allowed us to construct external enhancement devices that we can turn on or off at will. Animals which have developed night vision naturally as part of a nocturnal lifestyle cannot turn that feature on or off at will and thus are at a disadvantage during the daytime whereas humans are more generally adaptable. It is fairly clear that innate intelligence is among the very best, if not the best, of the natural abilities that have developed under evolutionary pressure. How else to explain why humans have dominated the earth and essentially escaped the natural system that once controlled them?

Re:The Singluarity is Near

[4D6963]

...computer power and strong AI are two very distinct problems. Computer power is all about scaling up power so you can do more in less time, that doesn't allow you to do anything new, only the same things except faster.

Not really. Assuming that strong AI will require massive amounts of parallel computing (which it will if we model it after the human brain), we need supercomputers to test and write these algorithms. So one (computer power) is a prerequisite for the other (strong AI)

What does your comment add to what I already said? A single computer can still do anything any super computer can do, only maybe slower. Doesn't change the fact that we still can't make a bug-like strong AI, and yet we've got crackpots going around drivelling about human-like AI. The point is we have all the power needed to get started. You can wait until we get a computer with a million cores doing an exaflop each, that won't begin to make you create a functional bug brain that can learn how to do whatever a bug does on its own.

Re:New goal...

[thanatos_x]

There's little doubt that innate intelligence can overcome brute force, but the incredibly crucial part is the ability to build upon previous generations work and to work collaboratively.

Termite and ant colonies are examples of this. There was a group of scientists who injected a mound with concrete, and when they excavated it, the inner area was dozens of cubic meters. Large nests can protrude 9 meters above the surface while the underground area can extend 25 meters. The nests are climate controlled, including ventilation and are somehow protected against rain.

All this from an insect that few would call intelligent. Compared to the relative size it dwarfs all but the largest cities man has built. General intelligence is nice, but even if we had 10 times the processing power of our current brains, but had to learn everything from scratch each time, I doubt anyone would ever get past the iron age. There is only so much one can do with a lifetime.

Also humans don't have a great deal of general intelligence it seems. There is a great deal of our brains dedicated to social interactions and emotions. If we ran with a simpler set of social interactions, I have no doubt the average human would make Einstein look like an idiot regarding physics. Some evidence of this can be found in individuals with certain mental 'defects', like autism, which are able to master a task well beyond what most other humans can hope to, even with intense effort.

Finally... it really depends on what you mean by control. Vermin and bacteria spring to mind as creatures that exist nearly everywhere, despite our best efforts to eliminate many of them. Yes, we thrive with the most purpose and with the fastest increases (hence the idea of a singularity), but we are not the only species to thrive on this planet.

Not Bloody Likely

[DynaSoar]

Between the rods and cones of the retina and the optic nerve are four layers/types of retinal processing cells. Unlike most neurons these operate entirely on inhibitory processing (rather than 85% excitatory and 15% inhibitory) and entirely on slow voltage gradient (rather than store up charge to a threshold and then fire a burst). How this accomplishes visual processing is a mystery to those of us to who understand real meatware processing. It is not likely a bunch of high powered supercomputer geeks even know this is how the visual system operates much less how to simulate it.

They way well use their XYZflops to develop a visual processing system of some sort, but it will NOT be a simulation of something that those who understand it far better than they understand it hardly at all.

If and when they get to actually trying to match the human visual system in operation (though by different processing) they'll have to figure out of to get their system to consistently guess with fairly good accuracy what it's going to be seeing 0.1 to 0.3 seconds in the future. Proof of that long suspected technique was just forthcoming in the last week or so.

There is nothing at all "intelligent" about this. It is all automated processing. Level of "intelligence" has nothing to to with visual proceses' efficacy. Anytime anyone inserts the "I" word into anything regarding computers, particulary when comparing with the human brain, they need to define their terms. Almost certainly those of us who have struggled for years with the insufficient and contradictory proposed definitions of "intelligence" in the human mind will be more than happy to fill them in on why their definitions have already been proven to be failures in humans, and why anything derived from those will not apply to system designed to provide human-looking output via entirely different means of processing.