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Artificial brain ten years away

by on23 July 2009

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Boffins invent new ways to mess with your head

A top boffin has told the BBC that a detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years.

Henry Markram, who heads the Blue Brain Project, said he has already built bits of a rat's brain which is only one stage up from a politician's. He said that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses. Blue Brain was launched in 2005 and aims to reverse engineer the mammalian brain from laboratory data.

So far the boffins have focused on the neocortical column repetitive units of the mammalian brain known as the neocortex. The project now has a software model of tens of thousands of neurons and have digitally constructed an artificial neocortical column. Although each neuron is unique, the team has found the patterns of circuitry in different brains have common patterns.

Of course there are few problems with scale. You need one laptop to do all the calculations for one neuron or one IBM Blue Gene machine with 10,000 processors to simulate one rat's brain.
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