THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ONLINE
IBM has a really interesting - and just slightly scary - plan. In cooperation with Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, a Swiss technical institute, they want to simulate the human brain.
Why? To help us understand how we work, on the deepest possible level. This is not the same thing as Artificial Intelligence (AI), programming a machine to act human. That would be a 'top down' approach to understanding the mind. This is 'bottom up', simulating the nuts and bolts of the organ itself, its biological wiring, its cells, even its molecules.
Which is quite an undertaking - in fact it is hard to exaggerate how big the task is. The brain is often described as the most complex thing in the universe. Complexity is rather difficult to define, but we can perceive it readily enough. Looking into the back of a TV, you're instantly aware that it's more complex than say a food mixer. Basically it looks a damn sight more tricky to fix. The parts are small, numerous, and connected together in many different ways. Perhaps that's the simplest shorthand measure of complexity: the number of different ways that the parts of something interconnect. The human brain has far more connected parts than any other thing known, certainly far more than any computer. Even Japan's Earth Simulator, built to model the climate of the entire planet, is nothing compared to the brain of even an average person.
It's no surprise therefore that they're not trying to do the whole thing at once, or anything approaching that. They are starting with the most interesting bit though: the neocortex (also called the cerebrum), the outside layer of the brain that appears to be most recent in evolutionary terms. It's not unique to us, but it is far more developed in humans than in any other animals and appears to be responsible for what we experience as thought.
But even on its own, this sector of the brain is impossibly complex for current technology to reproduce. All they hope to achieve right now is to simulate what's known as a neocortical column. This can be described as a single 'circuit' of the brain, or as one of its processing units; the whole neocortex contains about a million of them. And for the moment at least, they only plan to model it on the level of its cells. To get down to that of molecules will take vastly more computational power again, and for now remains a long way down the road. Even the current restricted project will be an immensely tall order. To model just this one circuit of the brain will require four whole modules of the Blue Gene supercomputer - the same technology IBM used to take the title of world's fastest back from the Earth Simulator.
So how far are we then from modelling the whole brain? Well assuming this first stage succeeds - it won't be easy - all they really need to do is scale it up. Vastly. Four of these Blue Gene racks would fit in an average kitchen. Four million? They would take up a golf course - and need the energy of five power stations.
When you consider that your actual brain fits inside your head and runs reasonably well on sandwiches and cups of tea, you realise what a gap there is between nature's technology and our own.
What's the point then in going to all this trouble when one can be made much more cheaply by just two humans? If the object were to create machines that think, this would clearly be a madly inefficient way to go about it. But that's not the object. The fact is we know amazingly little about how our own brains work. Simulating a part of one, even a solitary neocortical circuit, will teach us so much about what is really going on in there. Modelling allows you to find out why something is the way it is, because it can show you what would happen if it were different. The beneficial applications of that are obvious; as we see how it works, we gain greater insight into why it fails - what causes things like schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, autism, the things that plague our minds.
It's always good when research has palpable benefits of course, but to understand how the brain works really requires no such justification. To know our own minds is what I guess you could call a philosophical imperative.