Derek Zahn wrote:
Brain modeling certainly does seem to be in the news lately. Checking
out nextbigfuture.com, I was reading about that petaflop computer
Roadrunner and articles about it say that they are or will soon be
emulating the entire visual cortex -- a billion neurons. I'm sure I'm
not the only one who thinks that knowing what the cortex does and
roughly how it does it could be quite inspiring for AGI, so I was
surprised at this news.
Does anybody have links to more information (besides the short recent
mainstream news story)? Are they just being enthusiastic about their
big computer or do they have a sophisticated theory?
I don't have more information, but I would counsel caution.
In my past experiences with claims of this sort (i.e. "they are or will
soon be emulating the entire visual cortex") it turns out that when you
ask for the exact details of the project, you find that "entire" visual
cortex means something like "we are going to sample one neuron in 10,000
and measure 10% of its connections, then extrapolate from this to an
entire visual cortex".
Unless someone can convince me that they are going to scan a complete
visual cortex in such detail that they can track all connections, right
down to the individual synaptic boutons, and then translate that into a
precise computational model that takes account of all the molecular
mechanisms that play some role in signal transmission, I am not going to
buy it.
In fact, claims like this have become so outrageously exaggerated that,
these days, I cannot even be bothered to move the mouse far enough to
click on a link and go find out what the real story is.
Their big computer might be able to model *something*, but it sounds
like marketing hype to call that something "the entire visual cortex".
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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