IBM makes supercomputer significantly smarter than cat

[Renew Deal]

IBM has announced a software simulation of a mammalian cerebral cortex that's significantly more complex than the cortex of a cat. And, just like the actual brain that it simulates, they still have to figure out how it works.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at IBM have presented at paper at the SC09 supercomputing conference describing a milestone in cognitive computing: the group's massively parallel cortical simulator, C2, now has the ability to simulate a brain with about 4.5 percent the cerebral cortex capacity of a human brain, and significantly more brain capacity than a cat.

No, this isn't yet another example of Kurzweil-style guesstimating about how many "terabytes" of storage a human brain has. Rather, the authors quantify brain capacity in terms of numbers of neurons and synapses. The simulator, which runs on the Dawn Blue Gene /P supercomputer with 147,456 CPUs and 144TB of main memory, simulates the activity of 1.617 billion neurons connected in a network of 8.87 trillion synapses. The model doesn't yet run at real time, but it does simulate a number of aspects of real-world neuronal interactions, and the neurons are organized with the same kinds of groupings and specializations as a mammalian cortex. In other words, this is a virtual mammalian brain (or at least part of one) inside a computer, and the simulation is good enough that the team is already starting to bump up against some of the philosophical issues raised about such models by cognitive scientists over the past decades.

In a nutshell, when a simulation of a complex phenomenon (brains, weather systems) reaches a certain level of fidelity, it becomes just as difficult to figure out what's actually going on in the model—how it's organized, or how it will respond to a set of inputs—as it is to answer the same questions about a live version of the phenomenon that the simulation is modeling. So building a highly accurate simulation of a complex, nondeterministic system doesn't mean that you'll immediately understand how that system works—it just means that instead of having one thing you don't understand (at whatever level of abstraction), you now have two things you don't understand: the real system, and a simulation of the system that has all of the complexities of the original plus an additional layer of complexity associated with the models implementation in hardware and software.
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http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/11/ibm-makes-supercomputer-significantly-smarter-than-cat.ars

[unpossibles]

1. oh, so that means that even though it CAN open the closed bathroom door when I am in there

it's smart enough to know better?

[kentauros]

3. Or, it knows how to use the can-opener now.

:P

[applegrove]

15. Or that it can herd me to a bag of food well before the bowl is empty?

[Richardo]

2. So, it's a dog?

:shrug:

[UTUSN]

4. You and the O.P. are brave, brave souls!1 n/t

[Blue-Jay]

18. HA!

:thumbsup:

[yawnmaster]

5. is it ethical to turn off a computer like this, once you've turned it on? eom

[SteppingRazor]

6. Yes. eom

[yawnmaster]

9. are you sure? suppose it achieves sentiency? then what? eom

[slutticus]

10. Then you'd better unplug the fucker...and quick!

skynet

[yawnmaster]

12. It wouldn't be the level of skynet. It would be like pulling the plug on a smart cat. eom

[slutticus]

14. Skynet started somewhere. Why take chances? Pull the plug!

If some crazy looking people from the future come to try to unplug your "cat", I suggest you let them...

[yawnmaster]

16. you mean "kill it now!" thats what you really mean. admit it! eom

[slutticus]

29. Ummm...yeah.... Kill it, destroy it, execute it.....

I admit it...you got me!

:rofl:

[kentauros]

13. Or Colossus.

In which case, it might not be a bad thing to have it running the world :)

[SteppingRazor]

23. It can't. It's a computer model of intelligence, not actual intelligence.

Now, if what you want to talk about is whether or not it would be ethical to turn off a sentient computer, then we can talk about that, sure. That's a more dicey question, I suppose. (Although, in the end, I think the answer is still yes.) But in this case, there's no intelligence being wiped out, there's only a construction that mimics intelligence.

[yawnmaster]

31. how do you know that. How do you know whether it is a mimic or it is actual? eom

[meow2u3]

24. My question is, will the computer walk on you when it's time to feed it?

I couldn't imagine a cold computer walking on me at 4 in the morning.

[TommyO]

7. A quick note to IBM:

Don't give this thing opposable thumbs, and whatever you do, don't name it HAL!

[CatholicEdHead]

8. I guess nobody really owns it, they are all caretakers of the computer

and hopefully the box gets changed a few times daily. ;)

[old mark]

11. My coffee cup is significantly smarter than my cat.

My shoes are, too.

mark

[Orrex]

21. Yeah.

A photo of my cat is smarter than my cat.

[baldguy]

17. Most of the cats I know

[Gold Metal Flake]

19. When you shut the garage door, does it try to run under at the last moment?

[Blue-Jay]

20. No. Because it's *smarter* than a cat.

[Gold Metal Flake]

22. Ah, so it's squash-aware.

That's a feature!

[snooper2]

27. My cat does that...

and is smart enough to know that if he makes it to the door in time he will trip the sensor at the bottom thus making the door reverse and open again...


little fucker :rofl:

[Gold Metal Flake]

30. You should turn that off just once.

No cat should feel too sure of our mechanical world.

[Brewman_Jax]

25. So, it can let itself in and out

without getting in the window? Will it try to trip me while I carry groceries? I think that's why they created the handled plastic bags. :D

For God so loved the World He did NOT give cats opposable thumbs. He did this for a reason.

[petronius]

26. My laptop gets smarter than my cat every night - I shut it off before going to bed

Of course, my cat is no rocket scientist...

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

28. Can this computer move itself to the place on the carpet

where the sunshine lands? Then move itself throughout the day, as the sunbeam moves?

My cat IS that smart!

:hi: