Microchip Mimics a Brain With 200,000 Neurons 521
Al writes "European researchers have taken a step towards replicating the functioning of the brain in silicon, creating new custom chip with the equivalent of 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections. The aim of the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States (FACETS) project is to better understand how to construct massively parallel computer systems modeled on a biological brain. Unlike IBM's Blue Brain project, which involves modeling a brain in software, this approach makes it much easier to create a truly parallel computing system. The set-up also features a distributed algorithm that introduces an element of plasticity, allowing the circuit to learn and adapt. The researchers plan to connect thousands of chips to create a circuit with a billion neurons and 10^13 synapses (about a tenth of the complexity of the human brain)."
Re:AI Evolution (Score:5, Informative)
It's a nitpicky point, of course, but the whole point of many of the Asimov robot books was how poorly those laws held up in reality. I, for one, wouldn't trust any 3-laws robot for anything.
Re:This is nothing. (Score:3, Informative)
Mod parent up. Any Turing-complete computing device, given enough memory and storage, can replicate anything this hardware can do. The capabilities, programming model, performance, etc, can all be determined exactly without requiring a physical model. In fact, it would be ridiculous for them to not have completely simulated the hardware before testing it.
Re:This is nothing. (Score:3, Informative)
Any Turing-complete computing device, given enough memory and storage, can replicate anything this hardware can do.
But can it be replicated at a reasonable speed? The "analogue" in the name implies that the designers are taking advantage of the nearly-instantaneous nature of analogue computing.
In fact, the last part of TFA implies that this is exactly why the design was built as hardware - because software simulations were too slow.
Re:Speech capabilities? (Score:2, Informative)
This may be relative to your interests [photobucket.com], fellow fan of the radio show. Note the rat cavity.
Re:That's it... we're dead (Score:2, Informative)
Paraphrasing a book (forget the name), if you took a dog and made its brain 1000 times faster, all you'd get is a dog that needs 1/1000th of the time to decide whether to sniff your crotch.
Thinking faster would certainly be very useful, but it may not necessarily mean that the output will be of a higher quality.
you're absolutely correct. but this is exactly what results in higher quality output. consider Einstein had a brain 1000 times faster than he really had.
he would crack a problem in a day that would have taken 3 years.
suppose a normal person like you(most probably) and me had a brain 1000x faster than normal. we would learn faster, understand faster. we would achieve in a week what would take even a genius decades to accomplish.
simply due to faster processing speed.
quality will definitely increase if you have a faster processor, simply due to greater resources you will be able to throw at a specific problem.
Re:That's it... we're dead (Score:3, Informative)
A bull is a male cow WITH TESTICLES.
A steer is a male cow WITHOUT TESTICLES.
Thus, you'd be eating steer in the above scenario.
Re:This is nothing. (Score:2, Informative)
Mod parent up. Any Turing-complete computing device, given enough memory and storage, can replicate anything this hardware can do.
A digital system can never perfectly replicate an analog system, and a clock-driven system can never perfectly replicate an asynchronous system.
except that it does not need to perfectly replicate anything. it just needs to be good enough. after all, the human brain is also not perfect. errors happen. they will also occur in digital systems. why is there any difference?
Re:That's it... we're dead (Score:2, Informative)
To assume that robots will do what is good for its closest competition is to fly in the face of billions of years of natural selection.
Except that robots won't go through natural selection... Why do you think a thinking robot is more likely to care about "robot-kind" than "human-kind"? Because every species you see cares more for its own? That's the selfish gene acting. Those genes who made the carriers care for others with the same genes were more likely to go on. But of course, a human-build robot wouldn't go through that. It always amazes me that people can't think outside their own little instincts. Oooh, we shouldn't build robots because they will enslave us!! That's the stupidest idea ever. Robots, just as humans, do exactly what their programming tells them to do.
Re:That's it... we're dead (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Connection complexity: 2d vs. 3d ? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This is nothing. (Score:5, Informative)
However, we have to start somewhere and, in the words of Henry Markram (Blue Brain Project) "If we don't start now, when do we start?". The neuron models in the chip ignore spatial processing in the dendrites, but they do reproduce the variety of firing patterns found in real cortical neurons. The models of the chemical synapses incorporate have both short-term (adaptation, etc) and long-term (learning) plasticity, based on experimental data. Neuromodulation (by dopamine, etc) could be simulated by modifying synaptic and neuronal parameters, using the digital logic on the chips, although we haven't really thought about this yet.
The FACETS project involves experimental neurobiologists, theoreticians, modellers, and solid-state physicists (who are developing the chips). We are very aware of the necessary simplifications we are making, but we are also confident that we are making progress both in understanding brain function and in developing new approaches to highly-parallel, fault-tolerant computing.