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Mouse brain simulated on computer.
More accurately, half a mouse brain was simulated for 10 seconds, at one-tenth the processing speed of a biological mouse brain—or for one second, in artifical-mouse-brain time.
Despite repeated analysis, the researchers’ data unambiguously portray the artifical mouse’s cortical activity for that one second as being something along the lines of “Oh no, not again!” The team cannot explain this bizarre result, but suspect that petunias may have something to do with it.
Back when taking survey courses in AI and the like, it always seemed to me that modeling biological neural nets themselves, rather than one thing those nets happen to do (eg, logical operations on propositions), was clearly the “right” way to approach the problem.
(Other approaches have been used, but none have yielded anything helpful, even when this research has been carried out by mice, themselves.)
I have not heard much about neural nets in recent years, so I’m glad to see people are still working on them.
I also, in my unbounded expertise on the subject, have felt that contemporary hardware just isn’t up to the task. While software can exhibit non-deterministic behavior, computer hardware is linear and deterministic. Using that to try to model something not so constrained—consciousness—is of course going to be problematic. It’s kind of nifty that we’ve got the horsepower now to try to sort-of simulate even half a mouse brain, for one mouse-brain second. I think—expert that I am—that quantum computing looks like a good bet for delivering the goods in some future. If not, I suppose there is always consolation to be had.
Anyway, I’ve become a bit skeptical of top-down attempts to create real AI. The whole “born from the sea of information” thing always struck me as more poetic, certainly, if not simply more plausible. Crap, that wasn’t a Hitchhiker’s Guide reference. OK, time to end the post.
April 29th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Still, Man the Machine-Maker has a problem in attempting to create self-awareness by constructing something from the raw materials of the physical world. Consciousness, as we know it, arises from a cell-by-cell construction process authored or at least directed from within by the atomic map we call DNA. The Do-It-Yourself-Toolmaker-Kit consists of some arms, some legs, some eyes, some ears, some pumping organs, etc. The unifying ghost for this machine is in the minds of the designers and craftsmen who assemble it, not within the parts themselves. I note the theological implications here, but consider them irrelevant to the question of whether man can create Artificial Intelligence that duplicates human Intelligence. Mimics, yes. Identical to? Not likely with the matter-to-mind approach. I am not arguing for mind-to-matter per se, but rather for an information-imbedded-in matter-approach which sees each atom of the human being as particpating at some level of organization in the awareness net. Think of the hand as a neural extension of the mind, rather than as a neurologially (or otherwise) linked object. A machine consists of parts; a living organism can be seen as having parts. It is whole from within itself. A machine is not whole until the last joint is soldered into place, and it requires batteries.