Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/34797/supercomputer-takes-40-minutes-to-simulate-1-minute-of-a-human-brain/index.html

by kirtijthorat • 13 years ago

45 44 13 years ago

tweaktown.com

timcederman• 13 years ago

Actually a shorter amount of time than I was expecting.

maxerickson• 13 years ago

This article from last summer speaks of 1% of human brain activity:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57597049-1/fujitsu-super...

It also says "The synapses were randomly connected" among other more even handed discussion of what happened.

garrettdreyfus2• 13 years ago

What does simulating the human brain mean? Would a simulation lead to artificial intelligence or just quite a large neural network?

jds375• 13 years ago

Seems like just a large neural network (which could be of coursed used for AI purposes).

More detail is here in the original press release: http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/press/2013/20130802_1/

garrettdreyfus2• 13 years ago

Hmmm... I wonder If we could record the state of an active brain and "run" it in the computer creating sentience. Without getting theological, what would the difference between the brain and the computer be if they were exact copies and functioned in the same way?

gilgoomesh• 13 years ago

The experiment on simulated human brain activity involved 1.73 billion virtual nerve cells that were connected to 10.4 trillion virtual synapses

So... 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than a human brain. From Wikipedia:

One estimate puts the human brain at about 100 billion (10^11) neurons and 100 trillion (10^14) synapses

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron#Neurons_in_the_brain

Assuming linear scaling, that would put an actual simulated second of human brain neural activity somewhere between 6 hours and 2 days.

higherpurpose• 13 years ago

If it's 2 days that puts us about 26 years (2040) away, compared to the original assumption, which would put us 16 years away (2030), assuming "Moore's Law" continues to happen every 18 months (regardless of whether we'll be able to double the number of transistors per same amount of space anymore or not).

bpicolo• 13 years ago

Except Moore's law most likely isn't continuing for much longer, if it hasn't stopped already.

Ellipsis753• 13 years ago

Even if this was actually simulating a proper human brain it's still a silly comparison. Even now a modern computer struggles to simulate an old SNES perfectly at full speed. A SNES is vastly slower than a modern computer but the additional cost of emulating something can be very high indeed depending on how accurate you want the simulating to be. A computer is also very general purpose. I'm sure that some custom built chips and electronics would be much better at simulating these kinds of networks.

vehementi• 13 years ago

I've been running SNES emulators for a decade at full performance. What are you referring to?

jackmoore• 13 years ago

He was referring to accurate emulation, rather than the approximate emulator you get with a normal emulator. Here's a related story: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...

davea37• 13 years ago

Probably this: "It doesn't take much raw power to play Nintendo or SNES games on a modern PC; emulators could do it in the 1990s with a mere 25MHz of processing power. But emulating those old consoles accurately—well, that's another challenge entirely; accurate emulators may need up to 3GHz of power to faithfully recreate aging tech." - http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...

tekni5• 13 years ago

I don't think we would need to simulate a human brain 100% to have strong artificial intelligence. Similarly how we don't need to simulate the SNES 100% to be able to enjoy the games.

Furthermore I'm pretty sure a human brain also maintains various bodily functions, which use some percentage of the brain's computational power.

I also suspect that strong AI is probably not as complicated as we think, it's just that no one has thought of the correct set of ideas required for strong AI to emerge.

archgoon• 13 years ago

Better writeup (cites sources!) and discussion from 5 months ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157157

And the Riken Lab press release

http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/press/2013/20130802_1/

This is a link to the poster presentation. There does not seem to be a full paper associated with this research yet.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/14/S1/P163

The NEST simulator (The researchers Morrison and Diesman are integral people on this project):

http://www.nest-initiative.org/index.php/Software:About_NEST

NAFV_P2• 13 years ago

I looked up NEST, written in C++ with Python. What, no LISP?

When I hear AI being discussed LISP comes up fairly often. In the book "Meta Maths: The Quest for Omega" by Greg Chaitin, he mentions that Kurt Godel's work had a notation that was uncannily similar to LISP code. On the other paw he compares Turing's idea of code as something more akin to machine code.

theseoafs• 13 years ago

Historically speaking, Lisp was the de-facto language of AI for quite a bit of time. That's only been the case for classical AI research, however. People working on AI and machine learning these days aren't necessarily all working in Lisp -- they're usually working in high-performance languages, or in interpreted languages with high-performance libraries (e.g. Python plus numpy or scipy or what have you).

raldi• 13 years ago

Great, we're only 11 doublings away. By Moore's Law, that means we should have AI ready just in time for it to fix the Year 2038 problem.

qwerta• 13 years ago

An ACTUAL simulation of rat brain would be 1000 000x more useful.

eli_gottlieb• 13 years ago

And would carry a lot fewer disturbing implications about mistreatment of simulated former neurological patients.

forktheif• 13 years ago

If they really were simulating a human brain, that would have some pretty serious moral implications.

fragsworth3• 13 years ago

I think in the short term, companies that develop these things will behave ethically without any oversight (by making machines "enjoy" what they are doing) because doing something else would be inefficient or counterproductive. Why would you make an expensive thinking machine miserable? Humans that are happy are way more productive - and machines that are based off humans will be as well.

In the long term, if and when these things become mass-produced and cheap, people may want to do terrible things to them, in the same vein as animal torture. That may be when laws get put in place to protect them.

Someone2• 13 years ago

Ethically? I bet they will kill them thousands of times during development.

Suppose you, at one stage, have a simulation of a brain that isn't quite there; it talks and sees, but it's audio system doesn't work right. What do you do?

Even live debugging to repair it can be controversial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant#Criticism_and_...)

wybo• 13 years ago

I don't know. If you can simulate a brain, you can alter it. And if you can alter it, you can make it artificially happy, or simply remove areas hosting willfulness, sleep, sexuality or independent thought. Won't make them suitable for all tasks, but for some it would be more efficient.

Ethical? That's the question.

Strilanc• 13 years ago

Suppose the simulated mind goes insane within a few seconds. Just long enough to solve a captcha, before being restarted...

ExpiredLink3• 13 years ago

Not at all. Simulating your brain != simulating your mind. Don't become a victim of 'neurobollocks'. http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2012/09/your-brain...

dTal• 13 years ago

Your New Statesman link only talks about pseudoscience and doesn't support your assertion. The mind is an emergent property of the brain. If you can't simulate a mind by simulating a brain, then what in your opinion would it take? Or is it impossible because we all have ineffable souls that the laws of physics mysteriously cannot access?

alixaxel2• 13 years ago

Does this mean we are ~100 months away from 1:1 performance?

alixaxel2• 13 years ago

Does this mean we are ~216 months away from having 1:1 performance?

edoloughlin• 13 years ago

it is still hard pressed to compete with the brain in your head reading this article.

It took K around 40 minutes to simulate just 1 single second of human brain activity, even with all of its performance prowess. The experiment on simulated human brain activity involved 1.73 billion virtual nerve cells that were connected to 10.4 trillion virtual synapses, with every virtual synapse containing 24 bytes of memory.

There's no way the brain in my head could simulate 1.73bn nerve cells in 40 minutes.

wazoox• 13 years ago

We still can't properly simulate the puny caenorhabditis elegans brain with some accuracy. Don't hold your breath on this one.

biofox• 13 years ago

This. And we've had the complete wiring diagram for its brain for over 20 years.

There's a wide-spread assumption that knowing the brain's connectivity will be sufficient to emulate its function, but there's so much about the underlying molecular and electrical properties of neurons that we know nothing about.

It's somewhat analogous to having a circuit diagram where the components are missing. Dropping in random components but preserving the wiring structure won't result in the same functionality.

kirtijthorat• 13 years ago

One thing we have to understand here is that 1 second of human brain activity is quite a lot of computing! It's not 'just one second'. This incredible experiment shows how the human curiosity has gone so far to build a artificial thinking machine. It would be great to see the compute result of if we could add 10 Supercomputer.

moron4hire• 13 years ago

If we simulate a human brain as a way to make computers solve new types of problems, then we will have bored computers who procrastinate solving problems in favor of playing WoW.

Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain

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