I did an assignment on the Blue Brain Project once. It's an incredibly complex project with lofty ambitions.
One thing that blew my mind was how limited they were by modern storage technology. Storing high-fidelity neuronal cross-section images consumed more space than what was available at the time. Each scan was crazy massive, something like a petabyte or an exabyte.
To store the entire human brain in this fashion would consume more storage space than that which exists on Earth.
I've been curious if video codecs could be repurposed to store voxel data. Most approaches seem to use image stacks, but there's inherently going to be a lot of redundancy from slice to slice.
I'm sure a purpose-built format could be better with enough effort, but there's a lot of work put into video compression, so it seems like there might be a way to leverage that for some cheap improvements to 3D data storage. The storage solution that I've seen in practice has just been a folder of TIFs, so it seems like there's lots of room for improvement.
probably not cuz I'd imagine they want lossless compression (given as they don't understand the data well enough to do meaningfull (lossless) compression)
Was thinking of work like https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.12817.pdf although the compression improvements vs classical methods are much more impressive for lossy compression
Disclaimer - you have to believe in the multiverse or multi dimensions for this comments but...
This is the transcript of the talk I heard that told me about Blue Brain:
"It's called the Blue Brain project in Switzerland. They have combined many different types of technologies and what they have done is they have essentially created a type of MRI that can scan the entire brain. All of the intricate structures of the brain itself and what they have discovered is that some of us and have in our brains fourth, fifth, sixth dimensional structures already. There are other people that have seven, eight, nine dimensional structures in their brain. You're a third density physicality and yet in your brain you have multiple dimensional structures!"
I always come back to the book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland and try and grok that hey, maybe dark matter we observe here in 3d is just stuff from these weird other directions a flatlander wouldn't understand.
You don't have to believe in the multiverse because the dimensions they are referring to are not physical dimensions. They are mathematically orthogonal spaces upon which brain structures operate.
oh sure https://youtu.be/b4cGFVjtq-M?t=361 at the 6:00 mark. Fair warning everyone before you downvote, it's Alex Collier. Just take everything he's saying as satire if that helps.
Awesome, thanks! Appreciate you sharing the link despite the almost certain downvotes you'll get. Never heard of Alex Collier before.
If I may, as a thanks I'd pass along the author Samael Aun Weor which maybe you find some resonance with. Again to anyone else reading take everything he says as satire if that helps.
One thing that blew my mind was how limited they were by modern storage technology. Storing high-fidelity neuronal cross-section images consumed more space than what was available at the time. Each scan was crazy massive, something like a petabyte or an exabyte.
To store the entire human brain in this fashion would consume more storage space than that which exists on Earth.