NW-Bound
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A neuron is far more sophisticated than a transistor.
From an article describing an IBM project and a separate EU project to simulate the human brain:
Diesmann is one of the lead scientists of the Human Brain Project of the EU.
The article went on to say German scientists used 24 bytes of memory to simulate each synapse. So, that's 24 x 8 x 100 trillions = 19,200 trillion bits or transistors (1.92 x 10^16), just for the synapses.
The above is the number of transistors in 1.6 million NVIDIA processors.
And they did not even know if that was enough to model the neurons and synapses.
See: Why we’re a long way from computers that really work like the human brain.
The Human Brain Project has this Web site: https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/.
From an article describing an IBM project and a separate EU project to simulate the human brain:
The trouble is that at the moment, no computer is powerful enough to run a program simulating the brain. One reason is the brain’s interconnected nature. In computing terms, the brain’s nerve cells, called neurons, are the processors, while synapses, the junctions where neurons meet and transmit information to each other, are analogous to memory. Our brains contain roughly 100 billion neurons; a powerful commercial chip holds billions of transistors. Yet a typical transistor has just three legs, or connections, while a neuron can have up to 10,000 points of connection, and a brain has some 100 trillion synapses. “There’s no chip technology which can represent this enormous amount of wires,” says Diesmann.
Diesmann is one of the lead scientists of the Human Brain Project of the EU.
The article went on to say German scientists used 24 bytes of memory to simulate each synapse. So, that's 24 x 8 x 100 trillions = 19,200 trillion bits or transistors (1.92 x 10^16), just for the synapses.
The above is the number of transistors in 1.6 million NVIDIA processors.
And they did not even know if that was enough to model the neurons and synapses.
Neurons have many characteristics and properties. Any simulation can represent only a few of them, and hope this makes for a reasonably realistic model. “We don’t know which level [of description] is the correct one,” says Diesmann.
See: Why we’re a long way from computers that really work like the human brain.
The Human Brain Project has this Web site: https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/.
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