Fervent AI enthusiasts can keep saying that robots will be as intelligent as humans one day but that’s not happening any time soon. A supercomputer recently took 40 minutes to map only 1 second of human brain activity in detail.
In other words, there are so many indicators to consider and so many rapid changes happening inside our heads every second, that even a supercomputer with an extra-ordinary computing prowess takes 40 minutes to map only 1 second of it all. The supercomputer in question, K computer in Japan, is the world’s fourth most powerful supercomputer.
K computer was able to map the brain activity by simulating a network of 1.73 billion neurons, imitating actual human brain. It is pertinent to point out here that a human brain actually contains a whopping 86 billion neurons.
The test was apparently launched by the researchers in order to understand human brain better and create more accurate simulation software based on these findings. At the same time, they also wanted to find out the limits of K computer’s performance and its simulation prowess.
This experiment once again shows that it will be a while before computers get nearly as intelligent as humans. For this to happen, computers will have to be able to process billions of neuron-like computations each second and keep track of many different factors such as emotions. Scientists generally agree that an exascale computer capable of computing one quintillion floating point operations per second, will finally be able to imitate human brain. Intel plans to create such a system by 2018.
Courtesy: Pop Sci
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