Reverse Engineering the Brain

Oh yes, you heard it right. It’s no longer a stuff of science fiction. On July 25, 2008, Intelligence Realm Inc. has completed a simulation of 100 billion neurons, the estimated size of the human brain. The simulation used distributed computing and involved over 3000 volunteers, 10000 processors, 180 TB of data and it lasted for a couple of months. This was the first simulation that bypassed the 100 billion level and used database files to store the data. The simulation is one of the first steps in a long-term project that is aiming to build a large-scale artificial intelligence by reverse engineering the brain.

So how are the neurons simulated? The concept of artificial neural networks (ANN) is used which can perform tasks like predicting stock market, hand writing recognition, face recognition and many more. A typical ANN hardly consists of 100 neurons. Imagine the potential of an ANN with 100 billion neurons. 'Google' on Artificial neural networks for more information...

So what’s the catch? There are many challenges involved to simulate an ANN at this degree.
1) Interconnection of neurons and their weights associated.
2) The processing power and storage capabilities.

The latter can be solved in an economical manner by using a distributed computing scheme similar to SETI (wherein, volunteers can share their processing power). As for the storage, with TB’s of hard disks coming up, that shouldn’t be much of an issue.

To solve the former, scientists have decided to mimic the connections and weights used in the brain. After all it is nothing less than marvelous. Take a look at www.brainmaps.org. They have created a brain map of many species. So far 92% of the human brain is mapped because of the complexity involved.

To get the gravity of this research, imagine the following scenario. A person is permanently blinded because of damage to visual cortex of the brain. Since, human brain mapping is available. A Nano sized chip could be made containing all the ANN’s required to process visual data. The beauty of this is that we don’t even have to understand how the information is processed. All we have to do is device a way for it to interact with the remainder of the brain by interconnecting the neurons of the chip with the real ones with a Nano surgery just as described by the brain map. By this a permanently blind person’s vision can be restored. This is because; the visual cortex neurons, connections and weights are mimicked exactly as it was in the real brain.

Seems far fetched? You’ll be in for a real surprise. Back in 1980’s, it was estimated that the number of computers to be used by the year 2000 would be about 100.