Better writeup (cites sources!) and discussion from 5 months ago.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157157" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157157</a><p>And the Riken Lab press release<p><a href="http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/press/2013/20130802_1/" rel="nofollow">http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/press/2013/20130802_1/</a><p>This is a link to the poster presentation. There does not seem to be a full paper associated with this research yet.<p><a href="http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/14/S1/P163" rel="nofollow">http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/14/S1/P163</a><p>The NEST simulator (The researchers Morrison and Diesman are integral people on this project):<p><a href="http://www.nest-initiative.org/index.php/Software:About_NEST" rel="nofollow">http://www.nest-initiative.org/index.php/Software:About_NEST</a>
> The experiment on simulated human brain activity involved 1.73 billion virtual nerve cells that were connected to 10.4 trillion virtual synapses<p>So... 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than a human brain. From Wikipedia:<p>> One estimate puts the human brain at about 100 billion (10^11) neurons and 100 trillion (10^14) synapses<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron#Neurons_in_the_brain" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron#Neurons_in_the_brain</a><p>Assuming linear scaling, that would put an actual simulated second of human brain neural activity somewhere between 6 hours and 2 days.
Even if this was actually simulating a proper human brain it's still a silly comparison. Even now a modern computer struggles to simulate an old SNES perfectly at full speed. A SNES is vastly slower than a modern computer but the additional cost of emulating something can be very high indeed depending on how accurate you want the simulating to be. A computer is also very general purpose. I'm sure that some custom built chips and electronics would be much better at simulating these kinds of networks.
<i>it is still hard pressed to compete with the brain in your head reading this article.<p>It took K around 40 minutes to simulate just 1 single second of human brain activity, even with all of its performance prowess. The experiment on simulated human brain activity involved 1.73 billion virtual nerve cells that were connected to 10.4 trillion virtual synapses, with every virtual synapse containing 24 bytes of memory.</i><p>There's no way the brain in my head could simulate 1.73bn nerve cells in 40 minutes.
One thing we have to understand here is that 1 second of human brain activity is quite a lot of computing! It's not 'just one second'. This incredible experiment shows how the human curiosity has gone so far to build a artificial thinking machine. It would be great to see the compute result of if we could add 10 Supercomputer.
If we simulate a human brain as a way to make computers solve new types of problems, then we will have bored computers who procrastinate solving problems in favor of playing WoW.