Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain Likely by 2020 [Brains]

Aug 17th 2010
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Reverse-engineering the human brain so that it will simulate it using computers could be only a decade away, says Ray Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of the correct-selling book The Singularity is Near.

It could be the first step toward creating machines which might be more powerful than the human brain. These supercomputers can be networked into a cloud computing architecture to amplify their processing capabilities. Meanwhile, algorithms that power them could get more intelligent. Together these could create the final word machine which can help us handle the challenges of the longer term, says Kurzweil.

This point where machines surpass human intelligence has been called the ” singularity.” It’s a term that Kurzweil helped popularize through his book.

” The singular criticism of the singularity is that brain is just too complicated, too magical and there’s something about its properties we are able to’t emulate,” Kurzweil told attendees at the Singularity Summit over the weekend. ” But the exponential growth in technology is being applied to reverse-engineer the brain, arguably an important project in history.”

For nearly a decade, neuroscientists, computer engineers and psychologists were working to simulate the human brain for you to ultimately create a computing architecture based on how the mind works.

Reverse-engineering some aspects of hearing and speech has helped stimulate the improvement of man-made hearing and speech recognition, says Kurzweil. Having the ability to do this for the human brain could change our world significantly, he says.

The key to reverse-engineering the human brain lies in decoding and simulating the cerebral cortex – the seat of cognition. The human cortex has about 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses.

A supercomputer capable of running a software simulation of the human brain doesn’t exist yet. Researchers would require a machine with a computational capacity of at the very least 36.8 petaflops and a memory capacity of 3.2 petabytes – a scale that supercomputer technology isn’t expected to hit for a minimum of three years, in keeping with IBM researcher Dharmendra Modha. Modha leads the cognitive computing project at IBM‘s Almaden Research Center.

By next year, IBM’s ‘Sequoia’ supercomputer must be in a position to offer 20 petaflops per second peak performance, and a fair more powerful machine can be likely in two to a few years.

” Reverse-engineering the brain is being pursued in numerous ways,” says Kurzweil. ” The objective seriously is not necessarily to build a grand simulation – the $64000 objective is to comprehend the primary of operation of the brain.”

Reverse engineering the human brain is close by, agrees Terry Sejnowski, head of the computational neurobiology lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil’s assessment that about a million lines of code is likely to be enough to simulate the human brain.

Here’s how that math works, Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is inside the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, that is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information is additionally compressed into about 50 million bytes, in step with Kurzweil.

About half of that’s the brain, which comes all the way down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.

But even a really perfect simulation of the human brain or cortex won’t do anything unless it truly is infused with knowledge and trained, says Kurzweil.

” Our work on the brain and understanding the mind is at the innovative of the singularity,” he says.