IBM Can Simulate An Entire Cat Brain

Posted by on October 26th, 2011

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For those of us who’ve been whispering appointments, reminders and murder confessions to our phones for the past two weeks it won’t take much convincing to tell you that AI is already here in a major way. But what about the true simulation of a human brain. Using computer processing to replicate the hardware we have cranking in our noggins right now? IBM has begun that quest and are already 4.5% done.

In the meantime, they fully replicated the brain of an animal far more beloved on the internet: cats.

Nevertheless, IBM is trying to simulate the human brain with its own cutting-edge supercomputer, called Blue Gene. For the simulation, it used 147,456 processors working in parallel with one another. IBM researchers say each processor is roughly equivalent to the one found in a personal computer, with one gigabyte of working memory.

So configured, Blue Gene simulated 4.5 percent of the brain’s neurons and the connections among them called synapses—that’s about one billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses. In total, the brain has roughly 20 billion neurons and 200 trillion synapses.

IBM hopes to have the human brain replicated by 2019, which gives our new robot overlord plenty of time to prepare his 2022 campaign for President of the United States of America.

[Scientific American]

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