I'm a bit puzzled by these attempts at simulating the brain. I work in neuroscience, but very far from this field so I'm most probably at the worse point of the (estimated knowledge / actual knowledge) graph on this topic. The people working on these projects are incredibly smart, and are certainly aware of the following caveats, since they've been thinking about it for years. I'm actually posting this comment hoping that someone will jump in to prove me wrong.<p>This looks like a cargo cult to me.<p>Not "cargo-cult science" as denounced by Feynman where some nutjobs tried to make telepathy or astrology look scientific. This is real, serious work, with a sound methodological grounding.<p>I'm afraid that they are actually building a "cargo-cult" brain, because they actually are at the wrong spot of the aforementioned graph too. Think of AI in the 70's. AFAIK, we know far too little and the field is still too fragmented to build a reasonable model of the meso- and macroscopic structure-function of the brain (I'm actually unable to tell where one start and the other ends, assuming the distinction between both concepts isn't a false dichotomy).<p>You cannot emulate a brain out of the box. You have to simluate the whole embryologic developmental process (which is half directed (mostly at the population scale), half random (at the microscale), but it's actually more complicated) before you can start to educate it, assuming you built something functional. Once again, we know, at the same time, a lot and close to nothing about these development.<p>Brain simulation could be, oh the irony, a good target for genetic programming/engineering :-).
<i>The FACETS group now plans to further scale up their chips, connecting a number of wafers to create a superchip with a total of a billion neurons and 10¹³ synapses.</i><p>I just thought that they were going to have some serious problems with yield at that kind of scale, but then it struck me that that's kind of the beauty of it: it doesn't really matter if a couple of neurons don't work - if it's anything at all like a brain, it'll be remarkably failure-tolerant.<p>(based on my admittedly limited knowledge of brains, simulated brains and semiconductor engineering)