http://mindhacks.com/2008/10/12/a-bolt-from-the-blue-brain/ Neuroscience and psychology news and views. Fri, 24 May 2013 15:27:22 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://mindhacks.com/2008/10/12/a-bolt-from-the-blue-brain/#comment-6318 Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:24:55 +0000 http://mindhacksblog.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/a-bolt-from-the-blue-brain/#comment-6318 “Their ambition is to be able to run a simulation on the scale of the whole human brain within a decade.”
I’ve been following this project a bit and find it very interesting. However, they have yet say where this computing power is going to come from. I’ve read one press release where Markham simply seems to bet on emerging technologies such as quantum computing maturing within a decade. According the little I know about the progress of emerging computational ‘hardware’, this seems unlikely.
Assuming there is not a breakthrough technology that adds orders of magnitude to computing power within the next couple years, modeling billions of neurons at the molecular level seems intractable. Nonetheless, I think very valuable knowledge and techniques can be derived from modeling far less than the entire brain so the work is still awesome; just a bit early.
My guess is that he knows all this and the promise of modeling the entire brain is to generate excitement and support. It seems that the project isn’t very ‘open’, I wish they’d make more technical information public.

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