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Power required to emulate a human brain

Recently, I posted a article about how much computational power it would take to emulate the human brain, and my calculations were off by a factor of 10. I've corrected my estimates and here are the updated sections:

Emulating the Human Brain

The Blue Brain Project has successfully simulated 1 cordical column on the Magerit super computer (100 TeraFLOPS), and human brain has an estimated 1,000,000 columns.

So with 5.2 ExaFlops, one could emulate 52,000 cordial columns. And that’s 1/20th of enough power to emulate a human brain.

To emulate the entire human brain you would need approximately 100 ExaFLOPs

That's a lot of FLOPS!

I chose the above estimation because many others rely on calculating how many operations per second the brain can processes, not how many computer calculations to emulate the brain. I.E. It takes many more computer computations to emulate a brain computation.

Fore some more notes see: http://www.smartcomputing.com/articles/2002/s1302/39s02/39s02.pdf

Conclusion

Henry Markham in his recent TED talk, thinks that a human brain could be emulated in 10 years.

I agree with his estimate, using Moore's law 10 years seems like an achievable goal.

If you are interested in the subject you may also like Ray Kurzweil's research and books.

Print | posted on Friday, February 05, 2010 11:27 PM | Filed Under [ Original Posts Tech Commentary Robotics Commentary ]

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# re: Power required to emulate a human brain

Guys, take a look at this project: intranet.cs.man.ac.uk/apt/projects/SpiNNaker/

It's intended to do exactly that, using a more scaleable approach than Blue Brain.

Steve Furber, leading the project, designed the first ARM chip back when, and is worth taking seriously.

Disclosure: Steve is a friend and colleague.
2/6/2010 3:17 AM | Alasdair
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# re: Power required to emulate a human brain

You mean I only got 20 interwebs in my head? Oh man, the world just got smaller again :)
2/6/2010 5:13 AM | Gammagoblin

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