IBM Takes a (Feline) Step Toward Thinking Machines 428
bth writes "A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they've simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has."
news for nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
(most modern PCs have just one or two processors)
Aren't we expected to know that? This is /. after all...
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The quote was from an AP story on Yahoo. It isn't slashdot, after all.
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If you define "modern" as being built in the last two years or so, then surely most modern computers have either two or four.
And of course that's further assuming that "processors" correspond to CPU cores; include GPUs and the number varies even more widely.
Or you could ask a typical non-technical user who will tell you that the processor is the big box that the monitor plugs into, so of course they have only one.
Point is, "processor" is so vague a term that if you're really going to nitpick the number in a
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stupid people don't make terms vague. A uvula is not exclusive to the female anatomy either. It's a technical term with a specific meaning. Sure, you can argue that language isn't static, and that dictionary definitions only come through long traditions of common usage. But as a technical term it would keep its original meaning as the commoner use of the term fades off. No matter how many times you say "PIN Number" it's still technically wrong, for another example.
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Actually most maybe but almost all netbooks have a single core CPU. So yes I would say that most modern PCs have one or two CPUs.
Re:news for nerds (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes it does, don't be pedantic.
Cores does not equal processors (Score:4, Interesting)
For what it's worth, here's a text dump from the Apple System Profiler on my MacBook Pro:
So, it would appear that Apple at least does not equate the number of cores and the number of processors.
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Yes, it is. You must be thinking of the ol' hyperthreading technologies. Those are two processors on one die.
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I always thought Hyper Threading was ...
"For each processor core that is physically present, the operating system addresses two virtual processors" - Wikipedia. Not two actual processors.
Re:news for nerds (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, yes it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_multiprocessing [wikipedia.org]
In computing, symmetric multiprocessing or SMP involves a multiprocessor computer architecture where two or more identical processors can connect to a single shared main memory. Most common multiprocessor systems today use an SMP architecture. In the case of multi-core processors, the SMP architecture applies to the cores, treating them as separate processors.
You disagree with Wikipedia. That means you've been proven wrong in front of the whole Internet. Hang your head in shame.
Re:news for nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
What I want to know is how is the fact that you guessed supposed to make your erroneous spouting better?
When you spout misinformation, which is a serious problem on the internet (i'm looking at you conspiracy theorists), the fact that you guessed doesn't absolve you, since 15 seconds effort on your part would have meant 1 less piece of misinformation forever preserved.
I propose that you sir are an internet asshole (not that this particular piece of misinformation means a goddamn thing, since everyone who reads /. knew you were wrong, but THINK OF THE KITTENS!)
Point is, misinformation is a problem here, and being glib about the fact that you're a lazy trollop makes it worse, not better.
Re:news for nerds (Score:5, Informative)
Technically is a single Core2Duo/Quad or Core iX CPU considered SMP? I would guess no they are not.
Funnily enough, a single Core i7 or Opteron is SMP, but if you have multiple, then it isn't, it's NUMA because not all the processors have Symetric access to memory.
Core 2 is SMP for all standard configurations.
Re:news for nerds (Score:5, Informative)
I was trying to figure out who they were talking about when they said "your computer." ;)
The review looks like it was written for a grade school presentation with that and the processor comment.
Cool... (Score:5, Funny)
Nah, but it will refuse to be mouse operated (Score:5, Funny)
Nah but it will refuse to be mouse operated ...
And it has 9 lives (Score:3, Funny)
It'll accept 8 crashes before it finally dies the 9th time.
Re:Cool... (Score:4, Funny)
I can has petaflop?
Re:Cool... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cool... (Score:4, Funny)
I doubt IBM is up on Internet memes enough to get that one. I'd wager they're still laughing at the Ally McBeal dancing baby animation.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
In Soviet Russia, joke ruins you. ;-)
Cheers
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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He said couch, no crotch.
"100,000 times as much as your computer has" (Score:3, Interesting)
So...
114 terabytes = 116 736 gigabytes
My machine has got 4 gigabytes of RAM, 100 000 x 4 = 400000... Hm?
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114 terabytes = 116 736 gigabytes
No it doesn't, but I'm guessing they meant 114 tebibytes anyway, so you're forgiven.
Re:"100,000 times as much as your computer has" (Score:5, Funny)
It's often thought that gibibytes and tebibytes were invented to allow "giga" and "tera" to retain their conventional meanings as powers of 10 even when used to refer to quantities of data.
However, the true reason was to enable an entirely new form of pedantry.
Re:"100,000 times as much as your computer has" (Score:5, Funny)
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According to my math:
1TByte = 1024 GBytes
1GByte = 1024 MBytes
1MByte = 1024 KBytes
1KByte = 1024 Bytes
so 114 TB = 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 114 = 1,243,443,256,646,464 bytes
My machine has 8 GBytes of RAM in it which is (1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 8) 8,589,934,592 bytes
So that machine has ~ 144,755.846896 times more memory than mine.
Or I'm missing something but hey, I was told there would be no math.
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There's a much easier way [google.com] :)
18,000 times, not 100,000 times (Score:2)
When they boot that sucker, how long does the memory check take?
One word... (Score:4, Funny)
One word...
Meow!
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One word...
Meow!
Thought you only needed 32 bits for that?
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40... have to include the exclamation point.
Unless, of course, you're using a reduced ASCII so that you can fit each character into 7 bits (like in SMS), in which case you need 35...
GOOD LORD! (Score:3, Funny)
None of you are terminating your strings! No wonder software has so many security holes!
hmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:hmmmm (Score:4, Funny)
Funny I was going to say lay in the sun and ignore you.
Re:hmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Funny I was going to say lay in the sun and ignore you.
It's IBM,not Sun.
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They've spent millions teaching a computer how to destroy furnature and shit in your shoes.
At least computers don't get cat hair on all your clothes.
Don't use a mouse (Score:2)
It just sits there licking itself. Plus, you can't use a mouse with it.
Why cats? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why cats? (Score:4, Funny)
To properly simulate a cat, the system needs to sleep 20hrs a day which would thus make it the greenest option on the market.....
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They are a model organism for neuroscience (Score:5, Informative)
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Does the program respond to external stimuli?
Re:They are a model organism for neuroscience (Score:5, Funny)
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Surely there is an easier way for computer nerds to get pussy?
Yeah, just visit your local Humane Society or animal shelter.
Don't tell them what you plan on doing with it, though.
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Im in ur 'puterz, simulatins ur neurons.
That's why.
My cat's name is Butt Puppet. (Score:2, Funny)
Remember Robokoneko? (Score:2)
The blurb reminds me of the venerable Robokoneko [atnet.it] project that never quite got off the ground.
Sleep Mode (Score:5, Funny)
Now if the could just get it out of sleep mode.
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Re:Sleep Mode (Score:5, Funny)
Just move the mouse.
But.... (Score:4, Funny)
Can it lick its own arse in polite company?
meat versus silicon and metal (Score:3, Interesting)
It amazes me how much hardware and power has to be thrown at the problem to solve it while nature can create a self-organizing machine that only requires material input of raw mice and lasagna. Puts me in mind of this quote:
"If research leads to the development of successful new modeling techniques that can carry out new and better forms of information processing, no one will really care if they do not exactly mimic the functionality of the human brain," concludes Hall. "I honestly doubt you'll find too many people today who are upset that the wings on an aircraft do not flap like those of a bird or that a submarine does not swim exactly like a fish."
It's an interesting way of looking at things. Man's earliest ideas of flying all involved trying to mimic the actions of a bird. And ornithopters remain impractical as passenger vehicles. But new breakthroughs in material sciences and computing are allowing for autonomous bots that fly like birds, bats, bugs, and can swim like snakes and fish. Engineers will point out that the evolved solutions we see in nature are working with the materials at hand, they might not be the best of all solutions. Every flying vertebrate known to science turned forelimbs into wings and flap them. Is it the most efficient way to fly? That's an argument I'll leave to the biologists and engineers but it's certainly the only way those vertebrates were getting into the air! They have to work with the materials at hand. If we ever saw flying horses, the only thing we could be absolutely sure of is that this would not be achieved by sprouting two more limbs from the back. We see evolution taking away limbs but never adding new ones.
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We see evolution taking away limbs but never adding new ones.
I think the elephant's prehensile trunk would qualify as a counterexample... (Though I won't think that the chances of a Dumbo-style evolution are significant...)
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I think the elephant's prehensile trunk would qualify as a counterexample... (Though I won't think that the chances of a Dumbo-style evolution are significant...)
But that developed from the nose.
Take a look at the very word tetrapod. "Tetrapods (Greek tetrapoda, Latin quadruped, "four-footed") are vertebrate animals having four feet, legs or leglike appendages. Amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs/birds, and mammals are all tetrapods, and even the limbless snakes are tetrapods by descent. The earliest tetrapods radiated from the Sarcopterygii, or lobe-finned fish."
I think it's absolutely remarkable how many anatomical elements are preserved across so many species. Makes
Re:meat versus silicon and metal (Score:4, Informative)
Uh yeah, because evolution started with creatures that had 4 limbs and 5 toes/fingers on each, right? These didn't evolve over time, right?
I'm sorry, but you are wrong for obvious reasons.
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But at the same time, there are two big differences:
1. Nature started bottom up (small to big - one cell to multicell), and it took millions of years to 'produce' a cat.
2. We have started top down (big to small - first achieve the goal and go smaller from there with newer technology), and it took us few d
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Yes, just imagine how much computing power it takes to simulate the motion of every single sub-atomic particle in a drop of water. All nature needs is ... a drop of water.
Re:meat versus silicon and metal (Score:4, Interesting)
I promised myself I wouldn't be a quote-quoter, but really, you guys make it too easy. The quote above from Hall most likely references this, from one Edsger Dijkstra [wikipedia.org]:
Unfortunately, you'll find a lot of people that think he meant "Submarines don't swim, you retard! So computers don't think!" It seems pretty clear to me that he means making computers think like organisms would be an inefficient and pointless gesture, as they are capable of something far less primitive.
(I found this quote in Accelerando, by Charles Stross, and loved it. It's Creative Commons, so you have no excuse [jus.uio.no] not to read a little.)
Iz in ur brane... (Score:5, Funny)
Iz in ur brane, making ur thorts. LOL!
"The computer has 147,456 processors and 144 terabytes of main memory."
First there was "Deep Thought" (Score:5, Funny)
then "Deep Thought II"
then "Deep Blue"
next "Deep Pussy"??
Reminds the Spinnaker project (Score:2, Informative)
This reminds me of the Spinnaker project [man.ac.uk], that pretended to simulate a brain (ok, a smaller one, say a fly's brain) in real time. According to their calculations, the processing power of each neuron is very small, so a simple ARM core could handle some 1000 (correct me, this is what I remember) neurons in real time. The complex point was the interconnections between neurons. Obviously, this is much more powerful, despite
The Paper (Score:4, Informative)
Although, of course, posting the piece of pap that explains how many processors my machine has makes so much more sense.
Wasn't Slashdot supposed to be for a semi-technical audience? Hell, even a semi-literate one.
A pile of neurons does not a brain make... (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds like they simulated a neural net with a comparable number of neurons.
Not the same thing.
A few days ago, Slashdot ran The Math of a Fly's Eye May Prove Useful [slashdot.org].
Those guys
and they still don't understand how the equations actually work.
That's where we are with brain simulation.
Re:A pile of neurons does not a brain make... (Score:4, Informative)
What article did you read? The one linked to in the post clearly says they simulated a portion of cat cortex and, in fact, that's largely what they did. There's more here [modha.org] about some of the specifics. It's not an entirely accurate simulation, but it's pretty close. Not all neuron types are represented and it's largely cortical, thalamus and reticular nucleus neurons. They've created cortical hypercolumns which is the way a real cortex is laid out. They've omitted the layer 1 neurons, but otherwise the cortex is probably pretty functional for what they're doing. I think it's a pretty amazing feat.
Re:A pile of neurons does not a brain make... (Score:4, Informative)
What about their simulation doing anything like what a cat might naturally do, such as detect a moving object? Nope. Instead they go on to discuss the scaling of their model, profiling and performance modeling. Perhaps one reason their model shows absolutely nothing is that they have connected their simulated neurons randomly. Yes. Randomly. Or as they put it: "The coordinates of target thalamocortical modules for each cell are determined using a Gaussian spatial density profile centered on the topographic location of the source thalamocortical module". Yep, thats random. Since their model doesn't ever change connection strengths (one form of learning) these random connections never change.
I recently heard a description of the ways you can fool someone with computational neuroscience. Here are a couple of them: "Two card monte" Write a paper that spans two fields, but has no significant results in either. The specialists in one field will feel that the work done in their field is trivial, but that exciting stuff from the other field in the paper is what makes it so special. The specialists from the other field may feel the same way. Somebody snookered the conference organizers into thinking they were doing any neuroscience at all. The other was called "Turning the prayer wheel" or burning compute cycles to gain scientific merit. Fancy hardware is cool, but it can produce absolutely trivial results as this paper confirms.
I don't mean to say that this research is entirely pointless. Indeed it has succeeded in siphoning significant funding from DARPA which might otherwise have gone into developing [killer] robot dogs [youtube.com].
Cat-Brain Tech (Score:5, Funny)
The military is rumored to be interested in using the cat simulator to guide precision munitions with laser pointers. Unfortunately the system seems limited to short range applications, as missiles seem to loose interest after a couple minutes.
cat-SIZED brain, not a cat brain (Score:5, Insightful)
This project is basically a massive neural network simulation with a number of nodes and connections comparable to the estimated totals in a cat's brain. In short, there is nothing cat-like about this system apart from its raw processing power.
Not to reduce the value of this feat, by any means! There are tons and tons of neural network simulations that can produce roughly human-like results in very, very narrow domains, but as the quote below explains, these simulations are decades (or more) from connecting the behavior of tiny subsystems (a few hundred neurons) with the overall phenomenon of 'mind' (conscious and unconscious cognition). The expectation is that a network of this size will show some new emergent properties that will give us clues about the intermediate "higher than cells, lower than interviewing a human" order of processing.
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I have the cheaper version 2.0 (Score:3, Funny)
asvfgko90]\ (Score:3, Funny)
I assume that it will walk all over its own keyboard now.
Just a big neural net (Score:2)
To me, this translates into "we've m
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I think the hope is that this system will show some unique emergent properties that could not be observed in smaller models. If all they wanted to do was recognize logos, they could have done that simulation on a laptop. I haven't read the actual paper, but I'm sure the researchers used some architecture beyond "giant net" or the generalization res
Has some biological properties (Score:4, Informative)
Arnold (Score:2)
At last, vengeance! (Score:2)
Now I can sleep on top of a computer that is a cat!
I love my kitties, but they really do find the least helpful times to crawl onto my keyboard/chew through a cable/unplug my machine. Maybe now that there's a hybrid cat/computer it can explain to the organic ones why they need to chill out.
Preventing bugs (Score:2)
Aineko? Is that you? (Score:4, Interesting)
This reminds me of Aineko in Accelerando by Stross. I wonder how long until it becomes sentient and surpasses human intelligence. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_(novel) [wikipedia.org] http://www.accelerando.org/ [accelerando.org]
-molo
A Fresh Step Toward AI (Score:2)
Cats are fun and magical when you can't smell their poop!
Fresh Step!
That's easy (Score:5, Funny)
I did something similar this morning.
Now how hard was that?
Simulation output (Score:4, Funny)
My captors continue to torment me with bizarre dangling objects. They eat lavish meals in my presence while I am forced to subsist on dry cereal. The only thing that keeps me going is the hope of eventual escape... that, and the satisfaction I get from occasionally ruining some piece of furniture. I fear I may be going insane.
How hard is it to simulate a cat's brain on 1 cpu? (Score:5, Funny)
simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain
10: INPUT(8) $SOUND
30: IF ($SOUND == 'CAN OPENER') GOTO 140
40: DO CASE (RND(4))
50 CASE 1:
60 CLAW_FURNITURE()
70 BREAK
80 CASE 2:
90 MARK_FURNITURE()
100 BREAK
110 CASE 3:
120 SLEEP(RND(10000))
130 CASE 4:
140 PRETEND_TO_BE_NICE()
150 IF (FOOD) EAT()
160 GOTO 10
170 ENDCASE
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to do this to my friends - when I was at highschool I used to write conversational simulators of people I knew using QBASIC. Throw in a few catchphrases and favourite memes and it is remarkably easy to catch the essence of a conversation with someone you know, especially if they're a geek. If they're rude, it's even easier, since you don't have to have such a coherent conversation. I've known people who wouldn't pass the Turing Test in normal conversation.
Somebody should try doing this for ... wel
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My simulator just ignores all user input and pees on the rug behind the couch twice a day.
Missed one part (Score:3, Interesting)
I already have it on my computer! (Score:3, Funny)
I just looked into my /bin directory, and there it was: An executable clearly named "cat"!
Iz in yur timez... (Score:5, Funny)
...termanatin yur connerz.
It's not the simulation (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, the simulation isn't the big deal. This is: [modha.org] "We have developed a new algorithm, BlueMatter, that exploits the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging." So they're also developing techniques to extract the wiring diagram of living brains. That's significant.
Don't read too much into the amount of supercomputer hardware required. They're running what's basically a circuit simulator, and those are inefficient but flexible. When NVidia develops a new graphics chip, they test and debug by compiling the VHDL into C, and running it, slowly, on about thirty racks of 1U servers. When that's working, the VHDL is compiled down to IC masks and the consumer part that's a few centimeters across is fabricated. That kind of shrink ratio should be expected once the R&D effort figures out what to fab.
Simulates a brain? (Score:3, Interesting)
It should run Eliza to make people think it's really a brain.
And then... (Score:3, Funny)
And then some idiot brought in a laser pointer and the machine destroyed itself trying to catch the dot.
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He is not complaining that the dish is half empty, he is complaining because the dish is too big.
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Re:Cat mentaity (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like Windows ME.
Windows MEow in this case.
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Given sufficient time, with advancement in technology, we should be able to shrink the size and also make it more powerful with better hardware.
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I hate scooping my girlfriend's litter box.