PORTLAND, Ore.—Despite calls from some corners for more complex programs, the European Union’s Blue Brain Project said Monday (Sept. 17) that simpler supercomputer simulations are sufficient to realize its goal of creating an electronic brain.
Many neuroscientists had insisted that accurate brain simulations required mimicking the chemical-messaging that guides the growth of connections between neurons in the brain. But scientists at the Brain-Mind Institute at
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland) counter that randomly wired neural networks derived from reconstructed neurons are up to 95 percent.
[ARM TechCon 2012, the largest ARM design ecosystem under one roof, is Oct. 30 - Nov. 1 in Santa Clara. Click here to check out agenda.]The Blue Brain Project’s goal is to simulate the neural networks of the brain on supercomputers, then cast these virtual circuits into semiconductor hardware once their accuracy is high enough. If the chemical messaging systems of what neuroscientists call the brain’s
connectome— a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain—had to be simulated, too, the task would have been incredibly complex, adding years to the project’s timeline. Luckily, according to EPFL, a randomly wired connectome is sufficient.
“We simulated the connectome by detecting the touches between randomly placed 3-D neurons and compared them to experimental results in real brains and found that that our structural model predicted the distribution of connections with sufficient accuracy,” said principle author of the EPFL report, Sean Hill.
IBM Blue Gene supercomputer simulates 10,000 of virtual neurons packed into a 3-D space in random positions according to the density and ratio of morphological types found in corresponding living tissue.Source: EPL