Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 4 July 2008, 12:42 PM
Do the maths: HAL 9000 by 2018?
For example, work at Indiana University, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, and Harvard Medical School has uncovered a "superhub", a structure between the two halves of the brain where many networks converge, and that's active all the time. Exactly what it's doing and what happens when it goes wrong are two very interesting questions.
Connectomics has a higher aim, to produce a complete map of the brain's networks akin to the sequenced information from the human genome projects. That's ambitious, but by combining new extremely high resolution scanning technologies with computational analysis that pulls structures out of the data it seems entirely realisable.
Meanwhile, other intensive data crunching is cogitating away with IBM's Blue Brain project, where the team has built "a rat-scale cortical model (55 million neurons, 442 billion synapses) in 8TB memory of a 32,768-processor BlueGene/L" That's a long way from the ten billion or so neurons of the human brain – 180 times smaller, in fact – but in Moore's Law terms, that's around ten years. And the researchers are most definitely looking ahead: "Our long-term goals are to develop novel brain-like cortex size computing architectures along with appropriate programming paradigms, and to evolve C2 into a cortex-like universal computational platform that integrates and operationalizes existing quantitative neuroscientific data to build simulation of large networks of spiking neurons and a powerful learning machine: a cognitive computer" (from their report Anatomy of a Cortical Simulator - pdf).
You know what that means. Doesn't matter if you don't - it will know..
A lot of that work is going on in the same places as the connectomics research – so no prizes for guessing where that's all heading. We may have missed the starting gun, but the race to produce a full working model of the human brain has most certainly started.
PreviousComments on this post
Actually not bad for a prediction made in the late 1960's by Sir Arthur Clark. He'll only have missed by 17 years if it happens. We might actually have reasonable moon colonies in 2061 when I think it is the last of books in the series happens.
I about flipped out when they found mass-concentrations (or masscons) on the moon with one of the few lunar probes that was post-Apollo. They went back and did some primitive data-mining and discovered that the command modules of the successful Apollo landings were moving around due to changes in mass densities in the sub-strata under the orbital paths of the capsules. Net result was they figured out that meteor impacts would leave dense concentrations of presumably metals below the surface.
Not bad for a radar engineer turned author! I miss being able to go to a bookstore and find and read a new book written by him.
"Open the pod bay doors HAL."
Arthur Clarke is one of my major heroes, for all sorts of reasons. I knew someone who worked with him during the war on guidance systems; apparently you could never have described him as unsure of himself, even then.
My favourite predictive anecdote comes from the Voyager 1 flyby of Iapetus, where according to the preface to later editions of 2001, the photographs showed a "large, clear-cut white oval with a tiny black dot at the centre. Carl Sagan promptly sent me a print from the Jet Propulsion Laboratories with the cryptic note "Thinking of you..."."
Then there was the crew of Apollo 13 playing Also sprach Zarathustra on their tape recorder...
I think the best way to celebrate ACC is to read and write as much quality British SF as possible. With the old guard practically gone and the Strosswave well established, it's time for more (and Moore).
