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A comment on Can The Human Brain Project be saved, and should it be?.

Re:Can The Human Brain Project be saved, and should it be? by Animats on Monday February 16, 2015 @03:29PM (#9058820)
A reasonable near-term goal is to get OpenWorm [1] to work well in simulation. That's the simplest known organism with a system of neurons, and the connections have been fully mapped out. Until that works, there's little point in trying anything more complex.

The "the next step is the human brain" people have a poor track record. Rodney Brooks tried that once. He'd done a good reactive-controller insect, and then immediately tried to jump to human-brain level with Cog.[2] When he gave a talk at Stanford proposing Cog some years ago, I asked him "Why not try for a mouse next? That might be within reach." He said "I don't want to go down in history as the man who created the world's best artificial mouse". Cog was an embarrassing failure.

The Human Brain Project should be put on hold until OpenWorm works and that technology has been advanced to at least the lizard level. The Human Brain Project is likely to turn into an expensive supercomputer boondoggle.

[1] http://www.openworm.org/ [2] http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/cog/c...

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Re:Can The Human Brain Project be saved, and should it be? by simonster on Monday February 16, 2015 @05:34PM (#9059487)
The work and challenges for OpenWorm may not reflect the work and challenges for the Human Brain Project. Among other things, unlike most other neurons, C. elegans neurons don't spike. Action potentials make simulation more tractable since you only have to worry about propagating spikes, and not all internal state, between connected neurons. (At least ignoring things like ephaptic coupling, which is probably not that important in mammalian neocortex.) Also worth noting that the Blue Brain project supposedly succeeded in simulating 100 neocortical columns, which is 1 million neurons, vs. 302 neurons in C. elegans.
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Re:Can The Human Brain Project be saved, and should it be? by oco101 on Monday February 16, 2015 @05:11PM (#9059371)
Sure please take a look at this an tell me if you see any similarities (1990): http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/05/science/great-15-year-proj...
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Re:Can The Human Brain Project be saved, and should it be? by Animats on Monday February 16, 2015 @10:28PM (#9060517)
That was about sequencing DNA. It was known how to sequence DNA before the Human Genome Project started. It just cost too much and was too slow. That was a production scaling problem.

If we ever get to a mouse brain, it's just scaling from there - all the mammals have very similar DNA. We don't know how to make even a good lizard brain yet. Or even a full insect nervous system.

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