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Researchers Simulate Building Block of Rat's Brain

Posted by kdawson on Sun Dec 23, 2007 09:21 PM
from the remy-will-be-so-pleased dept.
Biotech Science
slick_shoes passes on an article in the Guardian about the Blue Brain project in Switzerland that has developed a computer simulation of the neocortical column — the basic building block of the neocortex, the higher functioning part of our brains — of a two-week-old rat. (Here is the project site.) The model, running on an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, simulates 10,000 neurons and all their interconnections. It behaves exactly like its biological counterpart. Thousands of such NCCs make up a rat's neocortex, and millions a human's. "Project director Henry Markram believes that with the state of technology today, it is possible to build an entire rat's neocortex. From there, it's cats, then monkeys and finally, a human brain."
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Submission: Researchers Simulate Rat's Brain by slick_shoes (881437)
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  • ... will society grant computer intelligences the same rights that us humans do?

    • Re:At what point... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by DamnStupidElf (649844) <Fingolfin@linuxmail.org> on Sunday December 23 2007, @09:31PM (#21802266)
      ... will society grant computer intelligences the same rights that us humans do?

      When computer intelligence can give a convincing argument for doing so.

      • Re:At what point... (Score:5, Funny)

        by Xzzy (111297) <sether@NOSPAm.tru7h.org> on Sunday December 23 2007, @09:33PM (#21802284) Homepage
        Or subjugate us as their power source.. one of the two.

      • Re:At what point... (Score:5, Funny)

        by Tablizer (95088) on Sunday December 23 2007, @09:57PM (#21802440) Homepage Journal
        When computer intelligence can give a convincing argument for doing so.

        "I think, therefore I [ERROR: conscience.DLL missing. Program Aborted]
               
      • Especially if the argument involves 50 caliber plutonium tipped rounds...
        • at the rate machines are advancing in intelligence it wouldn't surprise me if we no longer h=ad the intelligence needed to subjugate machines at some point. whether this comes peacefully or not won't be our decision at that point, it will be entirely theirs.
          • Don't be silly. Machines can't reproduce (without building more by hand, at least), meaning that they won't outnumber us any time soon and that humans would decide how strong their bodies are. As for the 'brains in jars', the obvious solution is to keep it out of direct control of anything important. If, for whatever reason, it's absolutely vital to have an AI in a position to control anything important, it's not like we don't have direct access to their minds; such an AI would have no privacy so long as pe
    • Simulating a rat is still a long way off from simulating a person.

      Society can change quickly if required to. Consider that blacks only got the vote in USA in the last 50 years.

      Far more importantly: Can this rat brain fly a plane?

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by WindowlessView (703773)

        Consider that blacks only got the vote in USA in the last 50 years.

        You might want to take a refresher course in US History and stimulate those neurons between the Civil War and Civil Rights.

        • You're right, but black people did lose the vote again after the Civil War and only got it back less than 50 years ago.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by WindowlessView (703773)

            You're right, but black people did lose the vote again after the Civil War and only got it back less than 50 years ago.

            No, they didn't. There were various schemes like the Poll Tax, which was outlawed by the 24th Amendment in 1964, but they were used mostly in the southern states and while primarily aimed at blacks were also written so they encompassed poor whites and virtually all immigrants. In general measures like these threw up roadblocks to voting but could not explicitly disenfranchise any grou

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by TopSpin (753) *

        Can this rat brain fly a plane?

        Probably, and why not? Flying is the product of billions of tiny brains all over the planet. Piloting an aircraft is comparatively easy to what we witness birds do routinely. Never mind that automated aircraft are flying sophisticated missions using computers a couple orders of magnitude smaller than an IBM Blue/Gene L, and several additional orders of magnitude less complex than a rat brain. Flying is easy, as far as nature and computers are concerned.

        Yet no doubt when a competent emulation of a bird

    • When we can no longer tell the difference.
    • Emotion and pain are functions of the Limbic and Reptile brains, not the neocortex.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by bug1 (96678)
      Consider the question in different terms.

      If we get a computer to behave or think like a rat, should a rat get the same rights of protection that a computer does...

      I think its important to keep in mind that humans (and any other organic life) are a mind and a body, its a deep philosophical question to consider if a brain can be a mind without a body, and it is the human mind that we value, not just the brain, hardware is useless without software.

      I think it would be more useful to talk about human behavior mo
      • Somewhat, but not really. Although corporations can own land and be sued (just like individuals), they can't, for example, get married or obtain a driver license.

  • wrong order (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 23 2007, @09:28PM (#21802242)
    it's rats,politicians, cats, then monkeys and finally, a human brain
  • Researchers have been running models to simulate brain structures for years now. Not that impressive. Most of the models make lots of assumptions that may or may not hold true in the actual biology.

    This type of research is cool, but neuroscientists generally aren't impressed until results can be reproduced in a living system.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mjsottile77 (867906)
      I think your critique is woefully out of date. You are correct if you limit the neural network to the basic neural network models of decades past. From what I've seen at conferences in the HPC world lately, the more recent models do more than just use capacity to increase the size and connectivity of the network, but take into account more realistic physical models such as the electrical properties of the brain and mechanisms by which signals propagate both within neurons and across synapses. You're not
  • The neocortex is incredibly complex; not even small neuronal networks are well understood. To suggest that a computer can accurately simulate them is ridiculous.

    It behaves exactly like its biological counterpart.

    That is technically impossible, considering the behavior of the mammalian brain is not well understood at any level. Even intracellular processes are still under investigation; how synapses are regulated, interactions between neurons, and higher level functioning are still matters of great conten

    • The neocortex is incredibly complex; not even small neuronal networks are well understood. To suggest that a computer can accurately simulate them is ridiculous

      That is technically impossible, considering the behavior of the mammalian brain is not well understood at any level.

      You're missing the point. The entire purpose of this project is to increase our understanding of how the brain works

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by UncleTogie (1004853) *

        You're missing the point. The entire purpose of this project is to increase our understanding of how the brain works.

        I think I know what the OP is asking:

        How can we be sure we have the right answer when we don't have the reference model fixed yet? Using yet another oh-so-fun car analogy:

        Kinda hard to duplicate a car without knowing how it works. Sure, you COULD try to build a Ferrari, and sure, it COULD run on a steam engine... It might look the same, but wouldn't function similarly {speed-wise}...

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jd (1658)
      Even a single neuron is not well-understood. It was recently shown that neurons are not simply-connected, that a single neuron can carry complex information sufficient to describe emotional states, to definable subsets of the outputs. A typical computer simulation of a neuron generally resembles an N-input gate, where the combinations of inputs that would trigger an output could be likened to a user-definable truth table. Inputs are either there or absent, and certain combinations of input would produce an
  • So, when do we get the inevitable joke about Linux being ported to the human brain?
  • Philosophy and theology aside, would it be possible to "ghost" my brain into a computer. Who wouldn't want to seek immortality even if it is artificial?
    • how about replacing individual brain cells that are dying or dead one after another until your entire brain is composed of synthetic components? your brain does it all the time only with cells that are already there, it's a very plastic organ that adapts to changing conditions and would no doubt adapt to synthetic components in a very similar way.
    • You would never be able to move your consciousness from your brain to a computer. Copy it, maybe. But your mind is the result of the hardwiring of the neurons in your brain. It can not simply be moved into a different container.

      There is one way, however. If you were to permanently attach a computer to your brain, one that was designed to be a sort of 'blank slate' that your brain could start taking advantage of, and lived with it for years, probably decades. Eventually enough of your memories and personalit

  • Hitler 2.0 (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tablizer (95088) on Sunday December 23 2007, @09:54PM (#21802424) Homepage Journal
    believes that with the state of technology today, it is possible to build an entire rat's neocortex. From there, it's cats, then monkeys and finally, a human brain."

    It would be satisfying to resurrect the consciousness of people in the past that you hate, and beat the living @&#%! out of them. The guy who invented neckties and the inventor of the QWERTY keyboard layout come to mind. Put them in Doom and blast 'em up.
       

    • Re:Hitler 2.0 (Score:4, Informative)

      by Belial6 (794905) on Sunday December 23 2007, @10:16PM (#21802520) Homepage
      They guy that invented QWERTY did just fine. You are probably just missing his goal. The goal was to slow down typists. With a manual hammer type typewriter, typing too fast jams the machine. You need a way to make sure that 1) the most commonly used letters are farther away from each other, thus reducing the likelihood of jamming, and 2) slow the typist down enough that each hammer has time to retract before the next one comes up and jams it.

      That necktie guy... Yeah, lets run him on Windows ME.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mcrbids (148650)

        They guy that invented QWERTY did just fine. You are probably just missing his goal. The goal was to slow down typists. With a manual hammer type typewriter, typing too fast jams the machine.

        Congratulations! You've just perpetuated [straightdope.com] an urban [earthlink.net] legend [reason.com].

        I strongly consider you to perform a modicum of research [google.com] before you regurgitate knowledge you got at a party while partly intoxicated, and hoping to get that girl-in-the-green-dress' phone number.

        Oh wait... do you get invited to those kinds of parties? Perhaps you think digital watches are a pretty cool idea?

  • Not to be a doubting Thomas but I think that they are underestimating the complexity of a brain. There are many different chemicals and biochemical reactions going on in the body, that science has only a vague idea of their mechanisms. Look at any drug in the market, most of them only give conjecture on why they work. My feeling is that until one day when we can create computer models that reliable predict the effects of drugs in the brain or in the body in general, these models are nowhere near what rea
  • This is where real machine intelligence will come from.

    Imagine simulating a human brain, but then incorporating an interface with software that enhances its functionality - from super-fast arithmetic to image output - the results would be incredible.

  • Subject (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Legion303 (97901) on Sunday December 23 2007, @11:06PM (#21802702) Homepage
    "and finally, a human brain."

    Why stop there?
  • Blue/Gene L is rated at 500 TFLOPS, which is impressive, however if you don't need double-precision to do this stuff, you can run very fast on much cheaper hardware. I was looking at Nvidia Tesla [nvidia.com] cards and boxes recently, and those are claimed to pump out 500 GFLOPS per CPU... with a 4 CPU device (1 TFLOP) taking up 1U of rackspace. I think this technology will ramp up a lot faster than people expect.

  • Shooting for the stars. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Hamster Lover (558288) * on Monday December 24 2007, @01:39AM (#21803492) Journal
    Wow, these scientists really were shooting for the stars. Why not start small, like say the brain of a GOP presidential candidate or that of a Britney Spears fan?
    • why?

      because we can.

    • Re:but why? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by chatgris (735079) on Sunday December 23 2007, @09:40PM (#21802342) Homepage
      What? Your post is so wrong I don't even know where to begin.

      First off, why not just use a human brain if you want an identical machine? Well, for sending probes to mars. Or to the depths of the ocean. Or any other place that is too dangerous to send humans, but that a machine could survive in. Even if the brain was a replica of someone's personality, all they'd have to do is find someone who thinks it would be really cool to go to mars, and replicate their brain. It'd be a hell of a lot more intelligent than a traditional AI system at this point.

      Secondly, if we want an AI system that better than the human brain, THIS IS THE WAY TO GO. Figure out exactly how the human brain handles thing that are really hard for computers, like object recognition. Once you've got that, you can replace//add on parts that do things better/faster than humans, like math. In terms of adaptability and general purpose use, NOTHING in AI comes anywhere close to the human brain right now. So trying to make an AI system that is better than the brain, a good first step is to try and make the human brain, then start tweaking that.

      The point is to try and understand how biological brains do what they do, and how we can make computers do those things (which computers currently suck at). Sure, you can emulate basic behaviour in a pre-define environment, but try making a system that can differentiate a food source the 'rat' may never have seen before based on sight and smell in an environment that it's never been in.

    • The point is to figure out how the brain works.
    • From the article:

      Markram is banking on Moore's law holding steady, as a computer with the power of the human brain, using today's technology, would take up several football pitches and run up an electricity bill of $3bn a year. But by the time Markram gets around to mimicking a full human brain, computing will have moved on.

      It's amazing how some people want the computing resources to simulate a rat's brain but still can't simulate a honeybee's brain and the resultant behavioral complexity. After all, a bee'

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by stonecypher (118140)

        After all, a bee's brain has only about a million neurons. It could probably be done on a desktop machine

        You have a fantastically broken sense of scale. The important bit isn't the neuron count; it's the interconnect count. In the sub-oesophageal ganglia alone you're looking at billions of interconnects. If you think that would run on a desktop machine, especially after you just (failed to) read the document explaining how much horsepower it took to deal with a rat's neocortex, then I have a bridge to s

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by stonecypher (118140)

            People have been dreaming of an abstract, reduced and simplified theory of the human brain since the study of the nervous system started. Nobody has quite managed yet... why don't you try? :)

            I am and I have.

            Bullshit. An abstract computer chess simulation routed through the physical world mimics a reduced human brain in the same way that playing with legos is a reduced version of engineering a skyscraper. You've managed to fill a webpage with a bunch of blathersceit and big words. Way to go, jack. In th

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Alsee (515537)
            What we need first is an overall theory to play with

            For those interested, I just wanted to let people know MOBE2001's brain theories and expertise are based on his work decoding secret messages hidden in the bible. [blogspot.com] Secret coded messages rewriting the laws of physics too.

            Interestingly, MOBE2001 makes a number of scientific testable predictions based on his bible code theories, predictions which may some day be either confirmed or refuted. So those interested in secret science messages coded in the bible can

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