They look like Pollocks…
But actually, these are two simulations of a whole cortical column, and 1000 pyramidal cells (a type of neuron) during a network simulation (blue cells are silent, red cells are firing), respectively, left—›right.
via EPFL, at Henry Markram’s Human Brain Project.
Kurtzweil AI:
a number of scientists have expressed serious reservations about Markram’s project.
Some say we don’t know enough about the brain to simulate it on a supercomputer. And even if we did, these critics ask, what would be the value of building such a complicated “virtual brain”? Some researchers say it is premature to invest money in a simulation while important principles of brain function remain to be discovered.
Haim Sompolinsky, a neuroscientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said: “The rhetoric is that in a decade they will be able to reverse-engineer the human brain in computers. This is fantasy. Nothing will come close to it in a decade.”
But those who say “it’s fantasy” and “never” have consistently been proven wrong. Although I agree with Sompolinsky, I do hope he will be, as well.
Meanwhile, despite all this, Itskov and the 2045 project…