The field of Computer Science is an
extremely diverse field, and can be applied to many different areas of study.
In addition to writing programs that we use in our day to day lives, computer
scientists have developed extremely specialized programs that help researchers
make complex calculations, help extrapolate data, and model complex systems.
One such system, which has proven
to be extremely difficult to model even to this day, is the human brain. Many
teams have tried tackling this challenge, like IBM's Watson's ability to search
its terabytes of memory for a solution, but it seems that the Computational
Neuroscience Research Group of the University of Waterloo went a step further.
They attempted to create a computer system that mimics how the human brain
solves problems. SPAUN, which stands for Semantic Pointer Architecture: Unified
Network, is a computer that contains over 2.3 million simulated neurons. Those
neurons are patterned into facsimiles of different parts of the human brain,
like the prefrontal cortex (memory) and the basal ganglia and the thalamus
(motor control). When tasked with remembering a sequence of numbers and writing
them down, SPAUN had a success rate of 94%. While there are many computers that
can do these tasked more efficiently than SPAUN, it is the fact that each of
the simulated neurons is communicating in the exact way that real neurons do.
While this sounds like a very
stellar achievement, we must keep in mind that we are still years and years
away from anything that completely simulates the human brain. Even SPAUN is a
very limited machine. The 2.3 million neuron count is puny compared to Watson’s,
and each task that SPAUN is given takes over two hours to complete. And if that
wasn't enough, SPAUN is not actually capable of learning or adapting. Its
neurons are hard-wired and incapable of dynamic modifications of the kind that
real neurons. All that said, this is still am impressive feat, and I
am very
interested in the future of this project.
Sources:
This is an interesting and well written post. I knew very little on the modeling of the brain other than that it was and has been attempted in the hopes to produce better artificial intelligence, and to understand how our own brains work. SPAUN is interesting, and I am glad you chose to reference this for further reading. Thanks, Matt, and Merry Christmas.
ReplyDeleteCool post Matthew. I had never heard of either of those Computers being made. SPAUN sounds like really cool topic, and at the same time kinda scary. What if it were to work at an 100% rate? Should we prepare for the terminators?
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