Re:In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not ...
by bserge on Friday July 03, 2020 @07:59AM
(#23723228)
It's absolutely amazing to me how efficient and powerful brains are. Just the simple action of say, moving from one side of a yard to another involves realtime sensor information, motor control and feedback, threat assessment and decision making, previous experience recall and more. In mere miliseconds even in mice.
It gets insanely more complicated for humans. If you decide to drill a hole in a piece of wood, your brain will process a ridiculous amount of information just for that single purpose, plus it's always running primitive functions like any other animal. Realtime.
I don't see any computer doing that anytime soon.
The University of Nevada used a 360 TFLOP supercomputer to simulate a mouse brain. They managed to simulate the neurons firing once every ten seconds. In reality neurons fire an average of 200 times per second. Even if their model was fully accurate, that means you need 720PFLOPS to simulate just the brain of a single mouse.
Barring computers based on completely different principles or a revolution in the way we understand physics, a installation at a single facility will never be able to fully simulate hundreds of experimental mice.