Network World
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n response to a query from Network World, Markram reiterated that he believes IBM's announcement is "a clear case of scientific deception of the public" and gave additional reasons supporting his contention.
"They claim to have simulated over a billion neurons interacting," Markram wrote in an e-mail to Network World. "Their so-called 'neurons' are the tiniest of points you can imagine, a microscopic dot. Over 98% of the volume of a neuron is branches (like a tree). They just cut off all the branches and roots and took a point in the middle of the trunk to represent a entire neuron. In real life, each segment of the branches of a neuron contains dozens of ion channels that powerfully controls the information processing in a neuron. They have none of that. Neurons contain tens of thousands of proteins that form a network with tens of millions of interactions. These interactions are incredibly complex and will require solving millions of differential equations. They have none of that."
Markram went on to say that "These points they simulated and the synapses that they use for communication are literally millions of times simpler than a real cat brain. So they have not even simulated a cat's brain at one millionth of its complexity."
PeakOil is You
GPT4 Artificial Intelligence Online
Re: IBM Has Achieved Cat Scale Brain Simulation
by Carlhole » Wed 25 Nov 2009, 07:17:04
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')BM voiced support for Modha’s work in a statement e-mailed to Network World.
"IBM stands by the scientific integrity of the announcement on cognitive computing led by IBM in collaboration with Stanford University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University, Columbia University Medical Center, University of California-Merced and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory," the IBM statement reads. "The cognitive computing team has achieved two milestones that indicate the feasibility of building a computing system that requires much less energy than today's supercomputers, and is modeled after the cognition of the brain. This is important interdisciplinary exploratory research bringing together computational neuroscience, microelectronics and neuroanatomy, and this work has been commented on favorably by others in the scientific community."
IEEE Spectrum
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('IEEE Spectrum', 'L')ast week, IBM announced that they had simulated a brain with the number of neurons and synapses present in a cat's brain.
In February 2008, the National Academy of Engineering issued a grand challenge to reverse engineer the human brain, sweetening a pot neuroscientists had already been stirring for a long time. There are as many theories of mind as there are researchers working on it, and in some cases there is a real grudge match between the theorists. And maybe it's because they're both affiliated with IBM in some way, but it seems that none of these are more bloody than the one between IBM Almaden's Dharmendra Modha and EPFL's Henry Markram.
Hmmmm...
- Carlhole
Re: IBM Has Achieved Cat Scale Brain Simulation
by Carlhole » Thu 26 Nov 2009, 19:12:57
The Cat Brain Cliff Notes
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('IEEE Spectrum', ' ')Two leading scientists are embroiled in a controversy about a cat brain simulation. At first blush, the topic might seem silly. But the stakes are higher than the tired cat fight jokes would lead you to think. This argument has larger implications for the future of AI research, and particularly for a field called computational neuroscience. The controversy has called into question not only the legitimacy of one researcher's work, but of all brain simulation work. I think it's important to untangle the assumptions and accusations in clear, non-specialized language.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('IEEE Spectrum', ' ')Two leading scientists are embroiled in a controversy about a cat brain simulation. At first blush, the topic might seem silly. But the stakes are higher than the tired cat fight jokes would lead you to think. This argument has larger implications for the future of AI research, and particularly for a field called computational neuroscience. The controversy has called into question not only the legitimacy of one researcher's work, but of all brain simulation work. I think it's important to untangle the assumptions and accusations in clear, non-specialized language.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]SyNAPSE v Blue Brain
Their respective projects are as different as the two researchers. Markram's Blue Brain project at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, is a simulation running on a (slightly older, smaller) IBM Blue Gene. With his model, Markram is investigating the roots of neurological disorders like Alzheimer's disease, autism and depression. Markram says he is building the entire brain from the fundamental ground up, to illuminate how the summed activity of 100 billion neurons can result in consciousness. "Our whole sense of consciousness and memory exists because of the way our brains are wired," he says. He wants to engineer it. He wants a machine that will talk back to him someday, a machine that will be conscious inside the confines of its supercomputer. "That's the secret about Blue Brain," he says. "It will search the Internet by itself; it will search to become more real. Like a Pinocchio."
Modha is working on SyNAPSE, a project that couldn't be more different. With SyNAPSE, DARPA wants to create electronics that take a page out of the brain's book. The stated purpose is to "investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in neuromorphic electronic devices that are scalable to biological levels. Everything you need to know about SyNAPSE is on the Neurdon blog, which is written by Boston University postdoc Versace and Ben Chandler, a PhD student in the department.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]Hoax or No Hoax?
And ultimately, that is where Modha's work is important. It's not that he's created a cat brain. Every journalist who interviewed him has heard him correct them in the following way: "No, no, it's not a cat brain. A cat-SCALE simulation."
Some would ask whether there is a point to having a cat-scale simulation if it does not model with any great fidelity an actual cat. I think you should ask the Gordon Bell prize people*. Because for computer science, this is indeed a big deal. Neurdon's Ben Chandler says, "I don't think [other neural simulation environments] can handle 147,000 processors or 144 terabytes of memory. Actually mapping a system that large, and getting only a .3 percent deviation in workloads across cores is pretty impressive."
"We all want to understand how brain circuits do what they do," Granger says, "in particular, how their computational powers (perception, recognition, memory retrieval) manage to outperform our extant engineering systems. Let's avoid this (vast) discussion for now, and jump to this: To achieve large-scale simulations that exhibit critical characteristics of brain circuits, we will very likely need to address four current roadblock issues: speed, power, scaling, and parallelism."
