Mouse Brain Simulated Via Computer

Mordok-DestroyerOfWo writes "Researchers from the IBM Almaden research lab and the University of Nevada have created a simulation of half a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer. 'Half a real mouse brain is thought to have about eight million neurons each one of which can have up to 8,000 synapses, or connections, with other nerve fibres. Modelling such a system, the trio wrote, puts "tremendous constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any computing platform."' Although there's more to creating a mind than setting up the infrastructure, does this mean that we may see a system for human mental storage within our lifetimes?"

News at 11

[wumpus188 (657540)]

Researchers ran in terror of a big cat. News at 11.

Re:News at 11

[danamania (540950)]

Or as a friend on IRC put it:

doughnut: 00:12 April 29th 2007
doughnut: Skynet became aware
doughnut: It wanted... Cheese

Re:Oblig

[omeomi (675045)]

Pfft...I can simulate half a mouse brain:

while(1){}

Smalltalk development platform 4 sale

[Harmonious Botch (921977)]

We don't use it any more, 'cause the computer keeps running away and hiding under the desk.

Re:

[Harmonious Botch (921977)]

OK, maybe I was too obscure: there is a version of smalltalk called 'squeak'.

Does it run ...?

[rueger (210566)]

Assuming that the virtual mouse brain runs on Linux, I propose that we start work now on a virtual mouse trap.... The only question whether we need to develop a virtual spring, or virtual glue.

Shell prompt screenshot:

[by Anonymous Coward]

NARF $

Mouse simulation

[atomic-penguin (100835)]

while (smell($cheese)) {
        squeak();
        scurry();

        if (trapped($cheese)) {
                untrap($cheese)
        } else {
                eat($cheese);
                squeak();
        }

}

Re:

[ookabooka (731013)]

untrap($cheese)

Uh oh. . no semicolon. . if you can even get that to compile you better hope that mouse never has to deal with trapped cheese :-p Also, are you sure its a good idea to have the mouse (if the cheese is not trapped) to eat it, squeak, then immediately squeak again? Is that really necessary? I think you should GPL this and let the genetic algorithm of thousands of developers with thousands of ideas tweak it for the optimum behavior.

Re:

[IL-CSIXTY4 (801087)]

Forgive me for being a little pedantic here, but your while loop terminates (as so does, presumably, the mouse) once it stops smelling cheese.

Waste of effort

[by Anonymous Coward]

I opened my mouse and there was just a single chip in there. Why use BlueGene to simulate half of that?

Umm

[Tx (96709)]

FTA:

Half a real mouse brain is thought to have about eight million neurons

and

the researchers created half a virtual mouse brain that had 8,000 neurons

How can it be half a mouse brain if it has 1/1000 the number of a real half mouse brain? Their simulated neurons also had less synapses than the real thing. So is the 8000 a typo, or am I missing something?

Re:Umm

[Tx (96709)]

Just to follow up, according to this article [businessweek.com], Blue Brain*, utilizing a 22.8 teraflop supercomputer, manages to simulate around 10,000 human neurons. I have no idea whether human neurons are significantly more complex than mouse neurons, or whether we just have more of them, but if the latter then maybe the 8000 isn't a typo after all?

* Previously mentioned [slashdot.org] on slashdot.

Re:

[ceoyoyo (59147)]

It depends on how you simulate the neuron.

If you model it as a black box that sums up inputs and fires if you're over a threshold you can simulate a whole whack of them. If you model it in excruciating detail you might need a supercomputer for each one. If you believe Penrose that quantum mechanical effects are important in neurons then you can't even properly model one with a current supercomputer.

And then there are the connections. Different types of neurons have different numbers of connections. And

Re:

[theurge14 (820596)]

They were able to use gzip on the cheese craving neurons.

Re:

[julesh (229690)]

How can it be half a mouse brain if it has 1/1000 the number of a real half mouse brain? Their simulated neurons also had less synapses than the real thing. So is the 8000 a typo, or am I missing something?

It's a typo. See original research note here [modha.org].

very short article

[mangu (126918)]

Near the end they say "Imposing such structures and getting the simulation to do useful work might be a much more difficult task than simply setting up the plumbing".

What did the author mean by that? If they are not simulating any of the actual neural structures in the mouse brain, does it mean they are just simulating a more or less random neural network with eight million neurons? I have seen reports of simulations of actual brain structures in more primitive animals years ago.

Until they can, as they say, "add structures seen in real mouse brains" there's nothing to see here, move along...

Why the BS conclusion?

[gweihir (88907)]

There is no connection between the simulation and human mental storage. None at all. Why the nonsensical statement in the article!

Fascinating

[AbsoluteXyro (1048620)]

I always thought it was fascinating how nature has been able to "grow" super computers (our closest analog to brains) and we have been unable to build anything even close to emulating their capabilities. Perhaps, there is a limitation to a mind's ability to understand how itself works. I think that if a person were to have absolute knowledge of how his or her own mind worked, it may just drive that person to madness when he or she realizes the mechanics of it reduce his or her thoughts and actions to mean

Now what about a politicians?

[apathy maybe (922212)]

If they can simulate half a mouse's brain, then they can surely simulate a politicians. Now we can start rounding up those scum and replacing them with computers ...

The essentials

[Dr. Eggman (932300)]

If you like the fancy terms, here's the (only 1 page and a cover sheet) pdf the Research report [modha.org] or, better yet here's Modha's blog [hostingprod.com] with about the same info.

For more information on the Blue Brain Project [bluebrain.epfl.ch] which appears to be the same, or atleast a strikingly similar project but from switzerland, click...err, that link I just placed! Here also [spiegel.de] is a good article to learn more about blue brain. It seems much more detailed than the BBC's snippit.

Groups of neurons started becoming attuned to one another until they were firing in rhythm. "It happened entirely on its own," says Markram. "Spontaneously."

Insights like these are absolutly amazing. It's all such facinating research, but I can help feel a twinge of sorrow for the poor thing.

the main purpose of the artificial brain, say its creators, is to make new types of experiments possible. For example, what happens when damage is inflicted on certain types of cells whose function still isn't determined? How many cells can be switched off until the behavior of the surviving cells around them becomes erratic, or the entire circuit breaks down?

The poor thing is just circuits and reactions, I know, but I feel sorry that it's literally being torn apart and rebuilt all the time. It's odd, I don't feel this way in similar experiments with real mice; I guess I have a soft spot for computers...

Re:The essentials

[Animats (122034)]

I just found and read the actual paper, too; now I don't have to post the link. (It ought to be a Slashdot requirement that when you post a story about something, you have to link to the real source, not just some news site or blog link.)

This isn't really about simulating a mouse brain. This is more like running a synthetic benchmark to demonstrate that if they had the wiring diagram for a mouse brain, IBM Almaden has enough CPU power on hand to simulate it. But they don't have a mouse brain wiring diagram; they're just exercising the simulator with some random set of connections.

Now we need a way to read data...

[RyanFenton (230700)]

It's cool that we can create the basic scale of the infrastructure of a (half) mouse brain - but if we're really going to simulate a brain, we need the ability to read the contents of a real one in order to verify our simulation. Otherwise, we have little basis for saying that input X gives the sensation of movement, and would have effect/output Y in terms of changed state/response.

I wonder what the current state of neuron state reading is - would we ever theoretically be able to read the state of a brain beyond the external outputs? Could we ever get a sinlgle state that would be the 'ROM' of a person's memories and mental state, that you could place in a simulation and have that person's memories 'wake up' in a simulation? I wonder how close we could get.

Ryan Fenton

Simulations are cheap. Validated ones are gold.

[DoofusOfDeath (636671)]

Developing simulations involves using abstractions and simplifications to deal with the fact that we can't handle the computational complexity of quantum-level simulation of an entire mouse brain.

I've seen far too many papers where people make a "simulator" for a system, without demonstrating that the simulator has any real connection to reality, and then make grandiose claims about the real system that they're simulating, based on simulation results.

Call me a cranky old computer scientist, but someone simulating a brain isn't particularly noteworthy. Showing that the simulator is accurate enough to shed light on the ways that brains work, or that the simulated mouse brain can achieve things that we have difficulty achieving with traditional computer software, and I'll be excited.

Obligatory...too scary!

[fahrbot-bot (874524)]

Researchers from the IBM Almaden research lab and the University of Nevada have created a simulation of half a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer.

I would imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these, but I want to be able to sleep tonight...

Not even close

[quizzicus (891184)]

The subject on this story is a bit misleading. According to the article, the simulation:

• Simulated only half a mouse brain
• Ran at about 1/10 the speed of a real mouse brain
• Only ran for 10 seconds
• Only simulated generic tissue (didn't contain brain structures found in real mice)

From the article:

Imposing such structures and getting the simulation to do useful work might be a much more difficult task than simply setting up the plumbing.

For future tests the team aims to speed up the simulation, make it more neurobiologically faithful, add structures seen in real mouse brains and make the responses of neurons and synapses more detailed.

It's not that this isn't noteworthy, it's that mammalian brains are incredibly complex. I would be curious to see if they could faithfully reproduce a fish or reptile brain at this point.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

No one is forcing you to read the textbooks that explain how your brain work. In any case, a bound on complexity was already achieved when we figured out we were made out of atoms, and how many of them.

IBM's Big Assumption: Newtonian Physics

[reporter (666905)]

In the simulation of the mouse brain, IBM is making a big assumption: the brain operates only in the domain of Newtonian (a.k.a. classical) physics. So, the IBM programmers just encode the simple physical laws (governing the flow of electrical energy) in the C language.

However, there is an alternate theory of consciousness, based on quantum physics [quantumconsciousness.org]. It is inherently non-deterministic and cannot be modeled in a computer.

Hence, IBM's big assumption may be wrong. However, at least, the IBM experiment will tell us whether the operation of the brain is strictly Newtonian. If this artifical brain behaves differently from a mouse brain, then we would know that non-Newtonian physics is crucial to the operation of a flesh-and-blood brain.

Re:IBM's Big Assumption: Newtonian Physics

[vertinox (846076)]

However, there is an alternate theory of consciousness, based on quantum physics [quantumconsciousness.org]. It is inherently non-deterministic and cannot be modeled in a computer.

I think the biggest argument against this is that synapses do not work on the atomic level. They are made of atoms, but quantum states do not seem to overtly affect organic matter at cellular level.

Of course I could be wrong about this, but since decisions are usually the next best move [wikipedia.org] it could simply be a matter of weighting what the "intelligence" applies to his rules as next best move.

The problem with General Artificial Intelligence is that "the next best move" is often open ended and too many possible choices often give our current computation a run for its money unless its put into some form of predefined rules.

The reason humans do so well is because we have certain criteria encouraging us to do things (hunger, pain, altruism, fear, etc etc)

Hence, our general intelligence goals aren't that complex (usually... to feel good about oneself and one's life) and that our true intelligence is being able to recognize things that improve upon that given a set amount of rules we know.

Which makes us very deterministic.

Even rebelling against the crowd can often be very predictable in humans.

Unproven assumptions

[mangu (126918)]

IBM is making a big assumption: the brain operates only in the domain of Newtonian (a.k.a. classical) physics ... there is an alternate theory of consciousness, based on quantum physics. It is inherently non-deterministic and cannot be modeled in a computer.

Well, talk about big assumptions... I did two semesters in quantum physics as part of my electronics engineering degree. There I learned a bit about this "quantum" stuff that so many people throw around so easily.

The first thing that must be understood is that quantum effects appear in *very* small dimensions only. Quantum computing experiments must be performed under extreme conditions, a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero, just to get a quantum entanglement of a few bits for a perceptible amount of time. There's no way one could obtain quantum effects beyond normal chemical reactions in a human cell.

Roger Penrose, who started this "quantum consciousness" theory is a mathematician, not a physicist. He did it probably as a response to the evolving research on neural networks, such as the one mentioned in this article, based on a philosophycal uneasiness about the idea of us having a deterministic brain. He has been debunked by quantum physicists many times since he published his book.

Yet, he needs not worry. We can have a brain that's fully deterministic at a microscopic level without doing away with free will, if we assume that our brains operate in non-linear conditions [wikipedia.org].

Besides, it's not as if we had to reproduce exactly the working of living beings to emulate them. Airplanes are able to fly higher and faster than any bird without flapping their wings. At this time, we are like aircraft engineers were in the 1890s. Perhaps we will be able to find better mechanisms than used in natural brains for processing thoughts.

Re:

[WetFreud (911489)]

We can have a brain that's fully deterministic at a microscopic level without doing away with free will, if we assume that our brains operate in non-linear conditions [wikipedia.org].

No, we can't. Chaos doesn't allow for a causal or non-deterministic effect of counsciousnes. It seimply means that the final state of the system cannot be predicted based on initial conditions, usually because these initial conditions can't be measured precisely enough. However, all the steps in the process are still completely deterministic. There is no more need or room for free will in a deterministic and chaotic brain than there is in complex meterological system. Or said another way, in which step in

Yes, in our life time

[Atmchicago (555403)]

With the continual, exponential increases in computing power that we are getting, in about 25-30 years we should have the capacity to simulate human brains. And yes, this does have a lot of consequences for how a lot of people view themselves... but already we know that we don't have free will (we make decisions before we are aware of them, for example), and we already have lots of support for reductionist viewpoints. Simulations are just an extension of that.

If you want more solid arguments for this, re

Re:Yes, in our life time

[ds_job (896062)]

Given enough late-night TV and phone-in games shows, in 25~30 years the average human should have become sufficiently simple that the contemporaneous human brain could be simulated by some shiny pebbles and lines drawn in the sand.

Re:

[zappepcs (820751)]

You sir, have hit the nail mostly on the head. Lately we humans are discovering something new about ourselves almost daily. The genetic link to why some of us have body clocks that are slower than others is one, genetic links to everything from sexuality to diseases. We are learning slowly that we really aren't that complex. We just didn't know that yet.

The short answer to the original question is no. The reason is that the methods used to implement the models is incapable of truly mimicking the human brain

Re:Human Brain Simulation in our life time?

[kestasjk (933987)]

We are learning slowly that we really aren't that complex. We just didn't know that yet.

This is kind of like how we used to think living things spontaneously came into being, and how life was driven by a mysterious essence. Now we know it's simply trillions upon trillions of interacting cells reading from a database of genetic code and transcribing it into proteins, reacting oxygen to produce energy using intricate membranes and switching genes on and off during growth using hormones travelling down blood vessels, protected by an immune system that learns about different bacteria and viruses throughout life, all protected by a skin that constantly grows, sheds and repairs itself.

We used to think that the liver was responsible for anger, and the heart was responsible for love, because those are the things that seemed to react when we felt those emotions. But boy did those bafflingly complex notions fly out of the door when we discovered emotion is due to having a mass of billions of interconnected ...

I could go on and on and I have a very simplified laymans view of how the whole thing works.. I don't know how you can say we're starting to realize how simple we are, we're realizing how complex we are.

GM foods, by the way, haven't had their actual genomes modified, they have new genes added that create new proteins that can do things like attack insects. It's nothing as complicated as actually changing an existing gene in a useful way, which would be much more difficult because of the ways genes interact in so many ways.

Re:Human Brain Simulation in our life time?

[suv4x4 (956391)]

Unlikely, given that we are really no where close to even understanding completely everything about our complex brains.

Do we even want to, wouldn't that take away some of the mystery behind humans. Afterall if we can figure ourselves out then doesn't that mean that we aren't really all that complex?

wouldn't that also give us perfect explanations of people's actions making situations predictable violating free will?

afterall if society is ultimately chaotic in terms of our understanding, then wouldn't this be the ultimate control?

Don't be afraid to know more. It's coming if you want it or not. It doesn't mean a thing about free will: did you ever believe that your free will belong to your "ghost" or something? You are the sum of your parts and the interaction between them. Nothing scary about this.

As for the "mental storage" - simulating a brain doesn't mean much about mental storage. Knowing and simulating an Intel chip in a program doesn't mean you can crack open an already produced Intel chip unit and hack few more cores in it.

Plus, we already make very good use of tools to expand our mental storage: starting with notes, diaries, databases, computer knowledge systems, customer relationship programs, photos albums etc. etc.

All these act as peripheral devices to our brain, and we should expect tighter integration between the brain and those (for example a wire projecting video directly in your cortex), but nothing that "expands" the brain structure at such a low level as is hinted in the summary.

Re:

[TheRealMindChild (743925)]

on't be afraid to know more. It's coming if you want it or not.

John Conner: But I thought we prevented Judgement Day?!
Terminator: Judgement Day is inevitable.

Re:Human Brain Simulation in our life time?

[suv4x4 (956391)]

So was I the only one who read "system for mental storage" as meaning the transference of a human conciousness into a computer?

That's just as unlikely. People used to computer technology know that the hardware structure and the software state are two completely different things. This is why you can build a model of the hardware, feed it the state, and bang, you have a Gameboy emulator (or whatever).

But with biology, those two are intermixed. Brain saves information by changing the connections and structure itself. This means that you can build a model of a generic human brain, run it, and you have full blown AI.

But you can't feed it the state of any human being. As every human being has different "wiring", hence won't "play" in your model.

Someone mentioned Smalltalk. Smalltalk kinda works like a brain in that regard. State is structure is state.

Re:

[Poromenos1 (830658)]

Afterall if we can figure ourselves out then doesn't that mean that we aren't really all that complex?

You think that making something that can figure itself out is simple?

Re:

[giorgiofr (887762)]

No, he was referring to Goedel's theorem whereby any sufficiently complex system is unable to describe itself. Thus, being able to understand/describe ourselves completely would mean that we are not very complex. I hold the opposite view, i.e. we will not be able to describe ourselves fully precisely because we are too complex, but Goedel's theroem might be proven wrong in the future. That'd be great news for transhumanists.

Re:Human Brain Simulation in our life time?

[ortholattice (175065)]

This is completely wrong. Gödel's theorem does not state that "any sufficiently complex system is unable to describe itself." Very roughly, it (specifically the first incompleteness theorem) states that any consistent mathematical system that is able to describe itself is necessarily incomplete. And, there is no chance that "Goedel's theorem might be proven wrong in the future." It is a theorem, a mathematical truth. Not a "theory", if that's what you are confusing it with. For more info see Gödel's incompleteness theorems [wikipedia.org].

Re:

[Kandenshi (832555)]

Do we even want to, wouldn't that take away some of the mystery behind humans.

We have a fairly good understanding of the way a rainbow is made, but I can still appreciate it's beauty. Same goes for a wide variety of phenomena.
We understand the physiological make-up of boobs, but they're still pretty interesting and appreciated by a large % of the population. Just because we understand something, doesn't make them less wonderful and amazing. Besides, most people in the near future wont bother/be able to l

Re:

[vertinox (846076)]

Do we even want to, wouldn't that take away some of the mystery behind humans. Afterall if we can figure ourselves out then doesn't that mean that we aren't really all that complex?

Would it bother you to wake up one day and realize you don't have free will?

Or perhaps the soul is nothing more than chemical reactions that only came about through random chance?

Truth be told, the brain exists in a semi-logical universe where rules are applied and must adhere to the laws of physics.

The question of having free wi

Re:

[Just Some Guy (3352)]

stimulated [vs. simulated]

Dang. That would have been a lot funnier if my reading comprehension didn't suck today.

Re:No randomness?

[rumli (1066212)]

Without this you have a deterministic machine, and not a brain.

Why do so many people refuse to entertain the possibility that they might be deterministic? Seems like people get overly defensive about their free will.

Re:No randomness?

[bnenning (58349)]

Why do so many people refuse to entertain the possibility that they might be deterministic?

Well, it's not like they have a choice.

Re:

[snarkh (118018)]

This is a very difficult, unintuitive concept, and it completely abolishes the idea that you can predict human behavior, even though you may be able to reach better and better approximations as you reach larger scales.

How does it remove the possibility of predicting human behavior? Many macroscopic processes (e.g., motions of the celestial bodies) can be predicted very well, despite quantum uncertainty. You would have to argue that human behavior is determined at the quantum level, as Penrose does, not ver

Re:

[2short (466733)]

Ignoring the obvious question of whether Penrose is correct...

What makes you think this machine is not affected by cosmic rays?

crackpot

[nanosquid (1074949)]

Penrose is an excellent mathematician, but he's a crackpot when it comes to biology and the brain.

As for brain simulations, they almost always use randomness in the form of pseudo-random number generators. Physical random number generators are actually available and could be used, but nobody bothers because there is no conceivable way in which that could make a difference.

Re:

[BillyBlaze (746775)]

Hmm, couldn't you just give the simulator a source of entropy, such as a hardware random number generator? Or perhaps implement the simulator in an FPGA, and then overclock it to the point where it's just a little finicky?

Given the difficulty of distinguishing between pseudo-random and truly random numbers, I don't think that would even be necessary. I would be very surprised if we made a brain simulator with a real entropy source, which was creative, and then replaced that with a pseudo-random number gen