In my opinion, biologically detailed large-scale models of the brain offer little value if the system is not embedded in a physical world. It is a first step in the right direction to examine vision. The brain is an adaptive system which becomes useless if it is cut off the environment. This brain-scale simulation of the neocortex on the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer for instance has brought little new insight.
Maybe it is useful to understand thalamocortical oscillations, or to understand how neural assemblies interact, but if you want to go beyond traditional AI, maybe it is not recommendable to build a biologically detailed large-scale model. A human brain has not only more than 100 billion neurons but also 100 trillion synapses. It is impossible to model this in the finest level of detail. I believe it is possible to achieve human-like cognitive performance and self-consciousness with computers, though, in the way I tried to describe in the first post: if the processing is parallel enough, if the model is not too biological, and if the system embedded in some kind of physical world (whether real or virtual). Maybe also a RoadRunner which controls an agent in the successor of SecondLife. Who knows.. Brain-scale simulation of the neocortex on the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/521/djurfeldt.html -J. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marcus G. Daniels" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group" <friam@redfish.com> Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2008 10:48 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] REPOST: The meaning of "inner". > > One code for investigating synthetic cognition is called PetaVision. > This code was adapted to Roadrunner and, like LINPACK, exceeded 1000 > trillion floating point operations a second in recent benchmarks. > Another project is the Blue Brain project at EPFL. > ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
