I think important caveats need to be kept in mind. From the New Yorker article:
I.B.M.’s Compass has more neurons than any system previously built, but it still doesn’t do anything with all those neurons. The short report published on the new system is full of vital statistics—how many neurons, how fast they run—but there’s not a single experiment to test the system’s cognitive capacities. It’s sort of like having the biggest set of Lego blocks in town without a clue of what to make out of them. The real art is not in buying the Legos but in knowing how to put them together. Until we have a deeper understanding of the brain, giant arrays of idealized neurons will tell us less than we might have hoped.
Thanks for this. The latest research report 10^14 already appears to be a significant update on that paper.
IBM now report roughly eight times as many simulated neurons and synapses, while the slow-down has gone from ~400x real-time to ~1500x real time. That works out at a factor > 2 in hardware improvement within a matter of months. They are using a custom hardware architecture and presumably there are still a lot of optimisations to be made. It can’t be very long before this can run in real time.
As said in other comments, nobody knows how to program this yet...
I think important caveats need to be kept in mind. From the New Yorker article:
The full paper might be useful: http://conferences.computer.org/sc/2012/papers/1000a085.pdf
Thanks for this. The latest research report 10^14 already appears to be a significant update on that paper.
IBM now report roughly eight times as many simulated neurons and synapses, while the slow-down has gone from ~400x real-time to ~1500x real time. That works out at a factor > 2 in hardware improvement within a matter of months. They are using a custom hardware architecture and presumably there are still a lot of optimisations to be made. It can’t be very long before this can run in real time.
As said in other comments, nobody knows how to program this yet...
The paper seems to indicate that the sim is running 388 times slower than real-time. I guess we’re not 100% there hardware-wise yet? Good.
this is worryingly fast IMO.