ARM daddy simulates human brain with million-chip super

@GSV Slightly Perturbed

"So if you manage to simulate a human-level consciousness, would you consider that it stops being a simulation? Does the Human Rights Act not apply if it's not human?"

Only if it could show that it had more intelligence than the average commentard. :-)

Seriously?

Its only a simulation until you can show that it can pass a Turing test. Even then, if you cut power, does that mean death, or just sleep if you can persist the last known state?

If you can persist the last known state, then when you restore power and restart the simulation, you just continue where you have left off. So no need to question about Human Rights Act.

Perhaps...

"...might become self aware, how to tell if it has"

Because it hacks into the robotic car plants and reprograms them to build flying, killing machines (or just hacks into the preditor network)

"...and what the ethical implications would be?"

It names itself "SKYNET" because it has developed a sense of humor and kills everyone that it can.

Of course not

I anyone knew that, that would mean it had already been done.

This is also just a coarse-grained simulation . Getting structure and interesting behaviour into this is another problem.

And in the end, I bet a smart machine won't be a large neuron simulator at all. Planes are not hundreds of flapping wings either. Some cross between Watson and Cog I reckon.

I thought he looked like

the nuclear researcher / mum's potential love interest from 'The Manhattan Project'.

John Lithgow

"Laugh while you can, monkey boy!"

And while you're busy sulking, moaning, and being pedantic

He is busy pushing forward the frontier, and moving closer to that goal.

I think this is to be applauded, and is an excellent allocation of resources that I am happy to contribute tax money to.

I know, right?

They didn't make a complete neural network from scratch, they just built a system to simulate a small part of one, so this effort is obviously a complete failure. After all, if you can't succeed completely in a gargantuan task in one go, you might as well not even start it.

</sarcasm> for the <sarcasm>-impaired.

And in circa 2048

when Filippo trundles up in his electric wheelchair to have his brain uploaded so he can outlast his physical body, they will cite the above post before sending him off to the Soylent Green plant.

They can't allocate 25kW of ongoing power to EVERYONE you know!

Will it run RISC OS?

And which version? Castle's 5, ROL's 4 or ROOL 6? Or will we get another variation?

Re: The Brain Handles Information

You may be right, in which case this simulation will discover absolutely nothing. Or it may be some *other* feature of a neuron's behaviour that we don't yet realise is significant, in which case (again) this simulation will discover absolutely nothing.

And when it doesn't work, we won't have a clue why not.

I'm all for blue-sky research, but this does seem to be a /complete/ shot in the dark. Would it not be smarter for these guys to take some lesser organism (like an insect), faithfully model everything that they believe is important, and then see if the simulation actually reproduces the observed behaviour? That experiment is doable and guaranteed to teach us something.

the day comes that artificial brains can be grown (and I'm sure that day will come)

Why on earth do you imagine that artificial brains might replace computers? Might they also replace hammers, screwdrivers, garden gates, kitchen sinks, guns, anti-personnel mines, nuclear power stations, garden shears, or chain-saws?

A computer is a machine that is capable of reading a list of instructions and executing them. It has no more intelligence than a screwdriver, never has done, and never will have.

As I've said before, this entire confusion is caused by the ambiguity of the word "intelligent" and its careless use by IT folks.

AC@09:53

In fact Steve Furber *also* ran the Amulet project.

But you're right if you want to cut the power bill asynchronous is *the* way to go.

I suspect this might have something to do with being able to observe and log the state of all the processors at the *same* time so you can establish what they are doing.

A question that gets *very* tricky when things aren't tied to some kind of central clock.