Cat Brains are 83 Times Faster than a Modern Super Computer
University of Michigan computer that learns
and recognizes uses cat brain as model
by Rosemary Black
You knew cats had nine lives, but did you know they’re also smarter than sophisticated supercomputers?
Since computers are slower than a cat’s brain, a new computer project involving the University of Michigan will use a feline brain as a model, http://www.dnaindia.com reports.
University of Michigan computer engineer Wei Lu, who already has built a “memristor,” a machine that can remember past voltages it was subjected to, now is working toward developing a revolutionary computer capable of learning and recognizing.
“We are building a computer in the same way that nature builds a brain,” Lu told the Web site. “The idea is to use a completely different paradigm compared to conventional computers. The cat brain sets a realistic goal because it is much simpler than a human brain but still extremely difficult to replicate in complexity and efficiency.”
Most sophisticated computers may be able to perform some jobs with the equivalent of a cat’s brain functionality, but instead of being a 10-pound mouse catcher, these are huge machines with more than 140,000 central processing units and their own dedicated power supply.
Despite all the bells and whistles, the computer, Lu wrote in his paper (online in Nano Letters) still performs 83 times more slowly than a cat’s brain. And that’s really the cat’s meow. – Source
It’s amazing how even after 6,400 years of devolving and being subjected to countless toxins in the environment, that God’s creatures are still highly functional and very intelligent. Truly, God’s creatures are far from “simple” or “primitive” despite what many God-hating Darwinists say when babbling about evolution.
More amazing facts about cats:
‘Brain’ in a dish flies flight simulator
11/4/2004/1:56 P.M. EST/1856 GMT
A Florida scientist has developed a “brain” in a glass dish that is capable of flying a virtual fighter plane and could enhance medical understanding of neural disorders such as epilepsy.
The “living computer” was grown from 25,000 neurons extracted from a rat’s brain and arranged over a grid of 60 electrodes in a Petri dish.
The brain cells then started to reconnect themselves, forming microscopic interconnections, said Thomas DeMarse, professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida.
“It’s essentially a dish with 60 electrodes arranged in a dish at the bottom,” explained DeMarse, who designed the study.
“Over that we put the living cortical neurons from rats, which rapidly begin to reconnect themselves, forming a living neural network — a brain.”
Although such living networks could one day be used to fly unmanned aircraft, DeMarse said the study was of more immediate relevance as an experimental aid to understanding how the human brain performs and learns computational tasks at a cellular level.
“We’re interested in studying how brains compute,” said DeMarse. – More here.
Mouse brain simulated on computer
4/27/2007/23:59 GMT/00:59 UK
US researchers have simulated half a virtual mouse brain on a supercomputer.
The scientists ran a “cortical simulator” that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer.
In other smaller simulations the researchers say they have seen characteristics of thought patterns observed in real mouse brains.
Now the team is tuning the simulation to make it run faster and to make it more like a real mouse brain.
Brain tissue presents a huge problem for simulation because of its complexity and the sheer number of potential interactions between the elements involved.
The three researchers, James Frye, Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, and Dharmendra S Modha, laid out how they went about it in a very short research note entitled “Towards Real-Time, Mouse-Scale Cortical Simulations”.
Half a real mouse brain is thought to have about eight million neurons each one of which can have up to 8,000 synapses, or connections, with other nerve fibres.
Modelling such a system, the trio wrote, puts “tremendous constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any computing platform”.
The team, from the IBM Almaden Research Lab and the University of Nevada, ran the simulation on a BlueGene L supercomputer that had 4,096 processors, each one of which used 256MB of memory.
Using this machine the researchers created half a virtual mouse brain that had 8,000,000 neurons that had up to 6,300 synapses.
The vast complexity of the simulation meant that it was only run for 10 seconds at a speed ten times slower than real life – the equivalent of one second in a real mouse brain. – More here.
Digital Rat Brain Spontaneously Develops Organized Neuron Patterns
Researchers hope the breakthrough could lead to a fully virtual human brain within ten years
by Stuart Fox
Blue Brain This image is a 3-D model of what the connections in Blue Brain would look like if they were flesh and blood neurons, not computer code. Blue Brain Project, via The Wall Street Journal
Four years ago, a team of researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland switched on Blue Brain, a computer designed to mimic a functioning slice of a rat’s brain. At first, the virtual neurons fired only when prodded by a simulated electrical current. But recently, that has changed.
Apparently, the simulated neurons have begun spontaneously coordinating, and organizing themselves into a more complex pattern that resembles a wave. According to the scientists, this is the beginning of the self-organizing neurological patterns that eventually, in more complex mammal brains, become personality.
The computer simulation utilizes an IBM supercomputer capable of performing 22.8 trillion operations in a second. And that’s just barely enough to simulate one part of a rat’s brain. Each individual neuron requires the computing power of a high-end desktop computer, and the small area of the brain that Blue Brain simulates contains 10,000 neurons. – More here.
Tiny Insect Brains Solve Big Problems
Insects have scientists re-thinking an age-old question: Are bigger brains better?
by Emily Sohn
11/16/ 2009/12:00 PM ET
Smaller brains do not necessarily mean less intelligence, as some insects have proven.
Insects may have tiny brains, but they can perform some seriously impressive feats of mental gymnastics.
According to a growing number of studies, some insects can count, categorize objects, even recognize human faces — all with brains the size of pinheads.
Despite many attempts to link the volume of an animal’s brain with the depth of its intelligence, scientists now propose that it’s the complexity of connections between brain cells that matters most. Studying those connections — a more manageable task in a little brain than in a big one — could help researchers understand how bigger brains, including those of humans, work.
Figuring out how a relatively small number of cells work together to process complex concepts could also lead to “smarter” computers that do some of the same tasks.
“The question is: If these insects can do these things with such little brains, what does anything need a big brain for?” said Lars Chittka of Queen Mary University of London, who presented his arguments along with colleague Jeremy Niven in the journal Current Biology. “Bigger isn’t necessarily better, and in some cases it could be quite the opposite.”
Because we are intelligent animals with big brains, people have long assumed that big brains are smarter brains. Yet, scientists have found scant evidence to support that view, Chittka said. Studies that have made those connections are fraught with problems. “If you try many measurements,” he said, “Eventually you will find one that shows a correlation.”
There’s a lot of evidence, on the other hand, that overall size is irrelevant when it comes to brain power. Among humans, individuals with larger noggins don’t have higher IQs. Whales, with brains that weigh up to 20 pounds and have more than 200 billion neurons, are no smarter than people, with our measly 3-pound brains that have just 85 billion neurons.
Instead of contributing intelligence, big brains might just help support bigger bodies, which have larger muscles to coordinate and more sensory information coming in. Like computers, Chittka said, size might add storage capacity but necessarily speed or usefulness. At the same time, it takes a lot of energy to support a big brain.
On a smaller scale, scientists are finally moving past the idea that locusts, ants, bees and other insects are simple machines that respond to events in predictable ways, said Sarah Farris, an evolutionary neurobiologist at West Virginia University in Morgantown. Study after study now shows that insects can, in fact, change their behavior depending on the circumstances.
Honeybees, which have been the focus of Chittka’s work, have tiny brains with fewer than a million neurons. Yet, the insects can classify shapes as symmetrical or asymmetrical. They can pick objects based on concepts like “same” or “different.” They can also learn to stop flying after a prescribed number of landmarks rather than after a certain distance.
Ants and bees have notoriously complex social systems. Along with other insects, they can move in a surprising number of ways to communicate or get around.
Bees, for example, can sting, scout for food, guard the hive and fan their wings for ventilation, along with more than 50 other behaviors. The insect’s behavioral repertoire, in fact, surpasses that of some vertebrates.”
“They are fantastically smart,” Chittka said. – More here.
There are four things which are little upon the earth, but they are exceeding wise:
The ants are a people not strong, yet they stack meat in the summer;
The hyrax are not powerful, yet make they their houses in the rocks;
The locusts have no king, yet all them go they forth by bands;
The spider takes hold with her hands, and is in kings’ palaces.
There are three things which go beautifully, yes, four are beautiful in walking:
A lion which is the most valiant among beasts, who doesn’t turn away out of fear from anyone; a greyhound; a he goat also; and a king, whom there is no rising against. – Proverbs 30:24-31 (my translation)
This post can be reached at http://animalbrains.tk