The Human Brain Project Kicks Off 251
Velcroman1 writes "What if you could build a computer that works just like the human brain? You could invent new forms of industrial machinery, create fully autonomous thinking cars, devise new kinds of home appliances. And a new project in Europe hopes to create a computer brain just that powerful in the next ten years — and it's incredibly well-funded. The Human Brain Project kicks off Oct. 7 at a conference in Switzerland. Over the next 10 years, about 80 science institutions and at least 20 government entities in Europe will figure out how to make that computer brain. The project will cost about 1.2 billion euros — or about $1.6B in U.S. dollars. The research hinges on creating a super-powerful computer that's 1,000 times faster than those in use today."
Conversion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A computer that works like the human brain? (Score:3, Insightful)
What will they have in ten years? (Score:2, Insightful)
A piece of hardware that processes information like the human brain? Or hardware plus software that can win a game show? (Well, that's been done so I guess it'd have to be able to win all game shows.) People have been trying to get the software right that can ``think'' like a human since the early '80s (Lenat, et al). Where are the thinking machines? Is throwing a ton of money at the problem all that was lacking?
Unless this people building this system have come up with a way to program a creative spirit into the system, I'm skeptical that it's going to amount to much and that humans are still going to have to interpret the results to decide what's something worth doing and what's crap.
It might make a much better Racter than anyone's ever seen before, though.
This time for SURE! (Score:2, Insightful)
Well-known manufacturers of supercomputers like IBM, Cray, Intel, and Bull, are committed to building the first exascale machines by approximately 2020. So we are confident we will have the machines we need...
Oh good, so AI is just 10 years away! -- as it's been for the last 50 years or so.
Not.
Going.
To.
Happen.
Seriously, how is this different from all the other AI research programs that have been done so far?
Did I miss the monkey brain project? (Score:3, Insightful)
I understand that we have far more invested interest in modelling the human brain for medical purposes than any other type of brain. However, if you're going to try to create a model of something vastly complex you should probably start with something easy (and by easy I mean less vastly complex). A short list of neuron amounts in various animals is here [wikipedia.org], an aplysia(sea slug) or fly brain, I would expect to be a much more reasonable starting point and one with the obvious advantage that you can experiment on, breed whole lines of defective forms to study, just generally have far more control and face no ethical issues with.
Oh and whatever differences may be present in moveing from fly to rat to monkey to human it isn't in the neuron itself those, from what I understand, are almost indistinguishable across species.
This project will not, and I suspect will make no meaningful attempt at, creating a thinking human brain simulation and is really just about better medicine for various mental diseases, which we do sorely need. If it was attempting to take a stab at hard AI "The research hinges on creating a super-powerful computer that's 1,000 times faster than those in use today" is most certainly a false statement: my smartphone is no more creative than the computers of yore that it is 1,000 times faster than.
I suspect they went the thinking machine angle just for the attention... Is it just me or is there a chill in the air? [wikipedia.org]
Re:This time for SURE! (Score:4, Insightful)
According to this Computerworld article from 2008 [computerworld.com], a lot of that "steaming pile of 1980s-style AI" is in use every day.
I, for one, am looking forward to the payoff of this new, basic research 30 years from now.