IBM makes supercomputer significantly smarter than cat - Polidicks

[b]IBM has announced a software simulation of a mammalian cerebral cortex that's significantly more complex than the cortex of a cat. And, just like the actual brain that it simulates, they still have to figure out how it works.[/b] An interdisciplinary team of researchers at IBM have presented at paper at the SC09 supercomputing conference describing a milestone in cognitive computing: the group's massively parallel cortical simulator, C2, now has the ability to simulate a brain with about 4.5 percent the cerebral cortex capacity of a human brain, and significantly more brain capacity than a cat. No, this isn't yet another example of Kurzweil-style guesstimating about how many "terabytes" of storage a human brain has. Rather, the authors quantify brain capacity in terms of numbers of neurons and synapses. The simulator, which runs on the Dawn Blue Gene /P supercomputer with 147,456 CPUs and 144TB of main memory, simulates the activity of 1.617 billion neurons connected in a network of 8.87 trillion synapses. The model doesn't yet run at real time, but it does simulate a number of aspects of real-world neuronal interactions, and the neurons are organized with the same kinds of groupings and specializations as a mammalian cortex. In other words, this is a virtual mammalian brain (or at least part of one) inside a computer, and the simulation is good enough that the team is already starting to bump up against some of the philosophical issues raised about such models by cognitive scientists over the past decades. In a nutshell, when a simulation of a complex phenomenon (brains, weather systems) reaches a certain level of fidelity, it becomes just as difficult to figure out what's actually going on in the model—how it's organized, or how it will respond to a set of inputs—as it is to answer the same questions about a live version of the phenomenon that the simulation is modeling. So building a highly accurate simulation of a complex, nondeterministic system doesn't mean that you'll immediately understand how that system works—it just means that instead of having one thing you don't understand (at whatever level of abstraction), you now have two things you don't understand: the real system, and a simulation of the system that has all of the complexities of the original plus an additional layer of complexity associated with the models implementation in hardware and software. The more faithful the simulation gets, the bigger an issue this becomes. The researchers allude to it in section 3.2.2 of the paper, when they describe a measurement tool they call the "BrainCam." "When combined with the mammalian-scale models now possible with C2," they write, "the flood of data can be overwhelming from a computational (for example, the total amount of data can be many terabytes) and human perspective (the visualization of the data can be too large or too detailed)." The problem described above doesn't mean that accurate simulations are worthless, however. You can poke, prod, and dissect a brain simulation without any of the ethical or logistical challenges that arise from doing similar work on a real brain. The IBM researchers endowed the model with checkpoint-based state-saving capabilities, so that the simulation can be rewound to certain states and then moved forward again under different conditions. They also have the facility for generating MPG movies of different aspects of the virtual brain in operation, movies that you could also generate by measuring an animal's brain but at much lower resolutions. There's even a virtual EKG, which lets the researchers validate the model by comparing it to EKGs from real brains. In the end, C2 is like having a (sorta) real cortex that you don't fully understand, but that you can rewind, snap pictures of, and generally measure under different conditions so that you can do experiments on it that wouldn't be possible (or ethical) with real brains. [b]Scaling and the singularity[/b] One of the major results from the paper is that C2 exhibits "weak scaling." In other words, as the total amount of memory in the model scales, the number of neurons and synapses that can be simulated scales roughly linearly, also. This is important, because it means that a future version of Blue Gene with two or three orders of magnitude more memory (and associated bandwidth and processing power) will be able to simulate an entire human brain. The model also exhibits "strong scaling," which means that increases in the amount of memory per CPU enable them to run the model faster, so that it will eventually be able to simulate a cortex in real time. [img]http://www.edhat.com/assets/catOfTheWeek/nedm.jpg[/img][img]http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:HA4WnticMUviRM:https://www.shopping.662mob.com/images/vs-sticker.gif[/img][IMG]http://i47.tinypic.com/12172hz.png[/IMG] [url=http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/11/ibm-makes-supercomputer-significantly-smarter-than-cat.ars]http://www.meow-mix.com[/url]

This is actually incredibly awesome

A cat can't beat me at chess though

This is where we're at?

[img]http://photos-c.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs226.snc1/7323_1047177278766_1805714465_103530_4152425_n.jpg[/img] [highlight](User was banned for this post ("Spam image" - cosmic duck))[/highlight]

So my cat isn't as smart as this computer? I don't know about that. My cat is mega smart. (Example: There is a dent in my front screen door. When you push it in, it pops back out and makes a very loud noise that anyone in the lounge room can hear very well. My cat learned this. Now he keeps doing it until we let him into the house. :bang:)

[QUOTE=Faren;18448896]So my cat isn't as smart as this computer? I don't know about that. My cat is mega smart. (Example: There is a dent in my front screen door. When you push it in, it pops back out and makes a very loud noise that anyone in the lounge room can hear very well. My cat learned this. Now he keeps doing it until we let him into the house. :bang:)[/QUOTE] Put some kind of metal grating over the dent and electrify it or even simpler, when you hear it hitting its head into your screen door, kick the dent back about five times as hard

Shows how far off we still are from replicating a human brain.

Interesting. I'd give it fifty to a hundred years at the current rate of technological advancement before they're able to accurately simulate human or near-human intelligence.

That means it's already two times as smart as Emperor Scorpious II.

What's with cats and computer science anyway? [IMG]http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/470000/images/_471786_catimage1300.jpg[/IMG] ^Comparison between interpreting signals from cats visual cortex and real image, creepy how the guy kind of looks like a cat from the cat's eyes.

Is frys going to be selling 144TB of main memory on black friday? I need some.

[QUOTE=archangel125;18448905]Interesting. I'd give it fifty to a hundred years at the current rate of technological advancement before they're able to accurately simulate human or near-human intelligence.[/QUOTE] Because you're an expert in your field. :smug:

Dammit, it's smarter then me :(

What the hell are they going to use it for....

[QUOTE=coolrider102;18448974]What the hell are they going to use it for....[/QUOTE] Really now...

[QUOTE=coolrider102;18448974]What the hell are they going to use it for....[/QUOTE] gaming pc's of course

[QUOTE=Perfumly;18448903]Just shows how far off we still are from replicating a human brain.[/QUOTE] True, but this stuff multiplies

[img]http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n3/n15861.jpg[/img]

[QUOTE=archangel125;18448905]Interesting. I'd give it fifty to a hundred years at the current rate of technological advancement before they're able to accurately simulate human or near-human intelligence.[/QUOTE] I will give it far less. I bet we will have a simulation of the human brain up within 25 years. A real-time simulation, however? That's going to take a bit of time.

Oh wow, what an insane waste of money. Yet still cool I guess.

[QUOTE=coolrider102;18448974]What the hell are they going to use it for....[/QUOTE] For experiments on the brain, without actually messing with a real one.

dont dinosaurs have smaller brains than cats :frown:

[QUOTE=Riotashuma;18449020]Oh wow, what an insane waste of money. Yet still cool I guess.[/QUOTE] I don't think you can put a price tag on greater understanding and knowledge of life.

[QUOTE=Riotashuma;18449020]Oh wow, what an insane waste of money. Yet still cool I guess.[/QUOTE] fuck advancing

[QUOTE=AwesomeDino;18449025]dont dinosaurs have smaller brains than cats :frown:[/QUOTE] Velociraptors, one of the smartest dinosaurs, had about the brain power of a modern chicken. Damn everyone for continuously breaking automerge.

[QUOTE=Wakka V2;18448928]Because you're an expert in your field. :smug:[/QUOTE] No, it's an estimate at best.

[QUOTE=coolrider102;18448974]What the hell are they going to use it for....[/QUOTE] To study how the brain works. Anyways, this is...just. Wow. I don't know what to say about this technology. I am sitting here looking at this bit and I have to ask "is it the 'future' yet?" Based on this, yes, yes it is. The implications of this are just incredible. The thing is they said the 'brain' is not real time. However in a few more years, it will be a real time. Just think of what that means. In a couple of decades, we will get to this point with a human brain, and eventually we will be able to fully simulate a human brain in real time. What does that mean? Will that program be 'alive'? Would it be self aware? If so, then what does that mean for us? Would we be able to transfer our consciousness into one of these machines? What would that lead to? Immortality? This is just crazy shit. It blows my mind more than anything else I have read about. Those who think this is a waste of time and money are the most ignorant people to ever walk the Earth. I say this because this could eventually lead to a better understanding of what it means to not only be alive, but what it is to be sentient: to be human. I am willing to bet that in 40 years time, this technology will become so advanced that there will be services to back up your brain daily, or hell, every minute of every day. It would open new doors to education and learning. New forms of medicine. New forms of entertainment. In 50 years, I can imagine that having a brain backup device in the home would be a common item. Imagine actual respawning if you die. They will just collect your brain archive and download it into a clone of yourself. It's essentially immortality at it's best. What this first step will lead to is just...simply incredible. 100 years from now everyone will have a respawn device in their home. The moment you die, the moment a clone is downloaded with the data from moments before your death. You wake up and say, "well that ruined my plans for the few hours. What the fuck hit me anyway?" Better yet, imagine the entertainment value. Fuck video games when you can have massive gun fights for real and not worry about dying permanently. I may be leaping forward too much, but... this could all be a reality thanks to these scientists who created this program.

[QUOTE=yawmwen;18449032]Velociraptors, one of the smartest dinosaurs, had about the brain power of a modern chicken. Damn everyone for continuously breaking automerge.[/QUOTE] When I see four chickens take down a cow without any loses then I'll believe that.

This was a very good use of time and money!