Researchers Just Turned On the World’s Most Powerful Computer Designed to Mimic a Human Brain

Researchers in the UK turned on the most powerful supercomputer designed to mimic the human brain for the first time last week, marking a big step toward replicating the power of the brain with silicon.

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Tau.Neutrino said:

Researchers Just Turned On the World’s Most Powerful Computer Designed to Mimic a Human Brain

Researchers in the UK turned on the most powerful supercomputer designed to mimic the human brain for the first time last week, marking a big step toward replicating the power of the brain with silicon.

more..

I can see Arnie Schwarzenegger will have to come back again.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Researchers Just Turned On the World’s Most Powerful Computer Designed to Mimic a Human Brain

Researchers in the UK turned on the most powerful supercomputer designed to mimic the human brain for the first time last week, marking a big step toward replicating the power of the brain with silicon.

more..

Somewhat skeptical at first. Eg. Why bother? But read further and this looks really interesting.

> In the human brain, neurons communicate with each other through brief flashes, or “spikes,” of electrochemical energy. Individual spikes don’t contain much information, but when hundreds of millions of spikes are happening simultaneously, it enables the sophisticated information processing that allows you to understand this sentence.

Yes. Having a computer that sends information by spikes looks well worth investigating. For starters, it uses less power when idle, and most computers only use about 1% of their processing power 99% of the time.

> a normal computer routes information, which usually involves much larger packets of information because they must also tell the system how to route the information. The SpiNNaker supercomputer is able to drastically reduce packet size. Put more simply: if normal computers are like sending mail through the postal service—complete with sending and receiving addresses, and a stamp—the SpiNNaker supercomputer is like sending mail if everyone had their own dedicated postman who knows the routes so well there’s no need to address the mail.

Good.

> The computer has already been used to create an 80,000 neuron model of the cortex

Not so good. Oh perhaps. 18 * 55,000 cores is a lot bigger than 80,000, but only by a factor of 12. There’s still something not quite right here, each neuron should require many fewer transistors than on a single core.

> Furber and his colleagues aim to eventually model up to a billion neurons in real time using the SpiNNaker supercomputer.

Ah, much better. A billion would give them a ratio of 1000 neurons per core. Nice. Very nice.