Social Machinery

Researchers from IBM were able to simulate the cerebral cortex of a cat (the most advanced part of a mammal’s brain) trough a massive supercomputer power.

The supercomputer has 147.456 CPUs and 144 terrabytes of main memory which simulates up to 1.6 billion neurons and 8.87 trillion synapses. The simulations, which incorporate phenomenological spiking neurons, individual learning synapses, axonal delays, and dynamic synaptic channels, exceed the scale of the cat cortex creates the dawn of a new era in the scale of cortical simulations.

Previously scientists have simulated 40% of a rat brain on 2006, 100% of a rat brain in 2007 and 1% of the human brain this year by using massive supercomputer processing power and advanced algorithms.

This new simulation runs 100 slower that a cat’s brains but it can simulate perfectly well how thoughts are structured and how 1 Billion neurons and 10 trillions synapses work together. Basically this brain reverse engineering was possible by creating a fresh algorithm IBM called BlueMatter that is aimed at spelling out the connections between all the brain’s cortical and sub-cortical locations

The cat brain has 15 times as many neurons as a rat and 50 times as many as a mouse. The cat has 13 times as many synapses as a rat and and 35 times as many synapses as a mouse. The new simulations are 4.5% of the size of human cortex simulations.

Cognition and computation arise from the cerebral cortex; a truly complex system that contains roughly 20 billion neurons and 200 trillion synapses.

Dharmendra Modha,  R&D Director for cognitive IT from IBM and main research driver mentioned that this experiment could bring computers  less dependant on structured data and more prepared to deal with ambiguity. These machines could incorporate mechanism for information gathering like human senses (smell, touch, sight and hearing) for taking decisions.

What about the human brain?

Computers capable of simulating the human brain’s power and efficiency could be just 10 years away, according to the leading researcher at IBM.

The human brain is fundamentally different from today’s computers in power and size, and the many scientists are working from how’s the brain works to build new kinds of computing architectures. So to achieve the goal scientists are combining supercomputing, neuroscience, and nanotechnology research.

By 2020, computers working at this scale can make realistic analysis of the world’s water supply systems, or financial systems. The idea is to detect causality behind phenomena, and to make those connections quickly and effortlessly, the way the human brain works. Writing such a program using today’s computers would be impossible but these future computers would be able to quickly extract and process answers to these kinds of enormous problems.