Friday, August 19, 2011

An AI at IBM

Modha, et al, report that IBM Research-Almaden is running a modular network of simulated phenomenological spiking neurons roughly equivalent in scale to a cat's brain or 4.5% of a human brain. (Comm. of the ACM, August 2011, vol. 54, # 9, pg 62) This "C2" simulator runs on an IBM Blue Gene supercomputing system but in order to reduce the power and space requirements in the future the plan is to employ newly developed neuromorphic chips.  Modha extrapolates to a human scale brain by about the year 2019.

I am not sure IBM will have the right functional brain modules identified by then or know how to wire them together.  Their work has been at a different level of abstraction. I see no provision for a value system for example.

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