Robotic Nation Evidence

Swiss lab works with IBM to uncover power of brain: "The scale of the project shows just how powerful our brains are. It will take an IBM eServer Blue Gene supercomputer containing more than 8,000 processors housed in four racks to model the behavior of something less than a billionth its size: a neocortical column is a cylindrical element roughly 0.5 millimeters in diameter and 2 mm long. A rat's brain contains 10,000 of them -- and the human brain around a million, according to Henry Markram, director of the Brain and Mind Institute at EPFL.

Markram's plan is to model the cylinders at the level of individual neurons: A neocortical column contains about 10,000 of those. Over years of research, he and his colleagues have accumulated a huge amount of data about how individual neurons behave and how they interconnect and interact with one another to make up a column. That data will be used to create a detailed model of a single neuron, including its three-dimensional form, inside each processor, with the Blue Gene computer as a whole modeling a column."

This computer's 8,000 processors combine to create 22 trillion FLOPS, or roughly 2.75 billion FLOPS per processor. They are using roughly one processor per neuron.

If the human brain has a million of these 10,000 neuron columns, then the brain has 10 billion neurons. Using the techniques described in this article, then, we would need about 27,500 quadrillion FLOPS to simulate the human brain. That is much higher than previous estimates. For example, in this Wired article the estimate of the human brain's processing power is placed at 100 trillion FLOPS: "A human brain's probable processing power is around 100 teraflops, roughly 100 trillion calculations per second, according to Hans Morvec, principal research scientist at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. This is based on factoring the capability of the brain's 100 billion neurons, each with over 1,000 connections to other neurons, with each connection capable of performing about 200 calculations per second.". The number given in Robotic Nation is one quadrillion.

It will be interesting to see where the number actually is.