
Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain - kirtijthorat
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/34797/supercomputer-takes-40-minutes-to-simulate-1-minute-of-a-human-brain/index.html
======
archgoon
Better writeup (cites sources!) and discussion from 5 months ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157157](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157157)

And the Riken Lab press release

[http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/press/2013/20130802_1/](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](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](http://www.nest-
initiative.org/index.php/Software:About_NEST)

~~~
NAFV_P
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
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).

~~~
NAFV_P
Greg says he wrote his first LISP interpreter in FORTRAN, around the early
1970's. I was thinking that NEST might have code that emulates certain
properties of LISP, I've heard of many LISP interpreters being written in
other languages over the ages.

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

------
Ellipsis753
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
I've been running SNES emulators for a decade at full performance. What are
you referring to?

~~~
jackmoore
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...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-
mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/)

------
raldi
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.

------
edoloughlin
_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
We still can't properly simulate the puny _caenorhabditis elegans_ brain with
some accuracy. Don't hold your breath on this one.

~~~
biofox
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.

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

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

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

~~~
fragsworth
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.

~~~
Someone
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_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant#Criticism_and_Controversy))

~~~
fragsworth
I don't see anything unethical about shutting it off. If nobody is emotionally
attached to it, and it doesn't suffer when it is shut off, who is harmed by
the shutdown?

~~~
Someone
Consider a person without relatives or friends. Would you consider it ethical
to shut him/her off, as long as that person didn't suffer from it?

~~~
fragsworth
As long as they do not care that they could be "shut off", I see nothing wrong
with it. If they dislike that notion (like real humans do), then the
possibility of shutdown would cause suffering and would be immoral/unethical
to allow.

You're assuming that the machines will care about being shut off - we would
probably design them so that they don't care about this, because this makes
them easier to work with. And then it's no longer unethical.

------
kirtijthorat
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
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.

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

~~~
jds375
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/](http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/press/2013/20130802_1/)

~~~
garrettdreyfus
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?

~~~
ckoepp
The problem currently is that we actually don't know how the brain works. I
know a lot of people claiming that they've found out - but if you dig deeper
you'll find most experiments only work in certain cultures and are far from
being THE theory which explains everything. I mean nobody today can actually
be sure that the power at which a synapse is firing has a meaning. We simply
have no idea - it may have significant influence but we're far from proving it
(can't find the paper describing this, as I'm not able to connect to the
university network currently).

This is bad news - especially for the AI-robotics guys, as they need this
knowledge to implement the next generation of smart robots. They hope to get
some "self reprogrammable robots" as this is what your brain seems to do all
the time.

So what do we technicians do? We're trying to build a machine to simulate a
brain (and hope we're right in our assumption how the brain works). There is a
huge project like this going on in the EU too [1]. This is the bottom-up
approach and it's far from all the press releases as there are too many
assumptions in it - even if those guys hate to hear it. There is a nice
documentary film with Jospeh Weizenbaum (former professor at MIT and close
friend of Chromsky) about this very issue and its ethical aspects [2].

The up-down approach is researched by system biologists (and other related
sciences). They aim at the bio-chemical and physical layers to figure out how
a brain works and it seems like this is complicated as hell. We're some kind
of programmable - even if nobody can tell how far this actually goes. Just
being raised in different cultures can have significant influence in how a
brain reacts in situations. Even siblings with the same DNA and are being
raised within the very same family you can find differences in how their brain
reacts...

So don't get too excited about all this - we're far away from being
"downloadable". Which is maybe not the worst thing if you're thinking about it
for a while. What would life mean if it's endless? And by the way: even if you
were downloadable, what tells you that you're still alive if a copy of your
brain is stored within an robot? There are hard philosophical questions behind
such issues...

[1] [https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/](https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/) [2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_%26_Pray](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_%26_Pray)

~~~
XorNot
Well isn't the real hope that we'll get the hardware close enough in
capability that one day a learning general AI just kind of pops out of it?

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

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

------
timcederman
Actually a shorter amount of time than I was expecting.

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

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57597049-1/fujitsu-
super...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57597049-1/fujitsu-
supercomputer-simulates-1-second-of-brain-activity/)

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

