Stories tagged synapse
Reverse engineering the brainCourtesy Thomas Schultz
Engineering computers that can think
Even simple brains, like those in a mouse, are amazing. A brain the size of a thimble that requires almost no energy, can navigate through mazes, survive in severe weather, or escape from a cat. Will we ever create a computer capable of such adaptable and creative "thinking"? One approach is to reverse engineer the brain of a mouse, rat, or cat.
Computer simulation achieves cat brain complexity
Dharmendra S. Modha is a team leader at IBM who is attempting to understand and build such a brain as cheaply as possible. Their latest achievement is a brain simulation with 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses.
Synapses are the key
Synapses are junctions between neurons and a key to how a brain learns. The strength of the chemical reactions within the synapses changes as the animal interacts with the environment These synaptic junctions are thought to encode our individual experience.
The problem with today's computers
Regular computer architecture has a separation between computation and memory.
“Surely there must be a less primitive way of making big changes in the store than by pushing vast numbers of words back and forth through the von Neumann bottleneck. Not only is this tube a literal bottleneck for the data traffic of a problem, but, more importantly, it is an intellectual bottleneck that has kept us tied to word-at-a-time thinking instead of encouraging us to think in terms of the larger conceptual units of the task at hand. Thus programming is basically planning and detailing the enormous traffic of words through the von Neumann bottleneck, and much of that traffic concerns not significant data itself, but where to find it.”
DARPA's SyNAPSE program
The goal of a DARPA program known as SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics) is to create new electronics hardware and architecture that can understand, adapt and respond to a a changing environment.
What is cognitive computing?
Cognitive computing is the quest to engineer mind-like intelligent machines by reverse-engineering the computational function of the brain.
There is no definition or specification of the human mind. But, we understand it as a collection of processes of sensation, perception, action, cognition, emotion, and interaction. Yet, the mind seems to integrate sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell effortlessly into a coherent whole, and to act in a context-dependent way in a changing, uncertain environment. The mind effortless creates categories of time, space, and object, and interrelationships between these.
Learn more about cognitive computing
- Dharmendra Modha describes IBM's research in Whole Brain Emulation and their plans to simulate the brain by 2018 (video at Singularity Institute)
- Dharmendra S Modha's Cognitive Computing Blog
- Modha's cognitive computing page at IBM Research
- IBM Nov 18, 2009 press release about cognitive computing progress using their BlueGene supercomputer and BlueMatter programming algorithm in modeling cortical simulations of a complexity equal to a cat's brain.
Tags : Humans are smarter than other animals, partly because of our big brains, but also because of the more complex way our brain cells are wired. British researchers have found that vertebrate brains use many proteins, missing in lower animals, that increase each brain cell’s signaling capacity.
