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Re:In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not ... by causality0 on Friday July 03, 2020 @02:31AM (#23721561)
This is less of a "we will replace natural meat with lab-grown meat" claim and more of a "we will eventually be able to travel to the moon using only a megajoule of energy" claim. It would take a vast change in our basic understanding of physics to effect such an innovation. The crux of the matter is that mouse bodies don't simulate mouse bodies, they are mouse bodies. The idea you could have something the size of a mouse body that could fully simulate a mouse body is ridiculous. Biology is computationally efficient.

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.

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.