We made a mostly functional cat brain, yay!

[TehGuy]

Weird title for the thread, but hey, it's true! I'm talking about this article from popular science.

Cats may retain an aura of mystery about their smug selves, but that could change with scientists using a supercomputer to simulate the the feline brain. That translates into 144 terabytes of working memory for the digital kitty mind.

IBM and Stanford University researchers modeled a cat's cerebral cortex using the Blue Gene/IP supercomputer, which currently ranks as the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world. They had simulated a full rat brain in 2007, and 1 percent of the human cerebral cortex this year.

The simulated cat brain still runs about 100 times slower than the real thing. But PhysOrg reports that a new algorithm called BlueMatter allows IBM researchers to diagram the connections among cortical and sub-cortical places within the human brain. The team then built the cat cortex simulation consisting of 1 billion brain cells and 10 trillion learning synapses, the communication connections among neurons.

Pretty cool stuff if you ask me. I know some other research team hopes to simulate a whole human brain in 10 years, too. Makes you curious about what we'll actually have 10 or 20 years from now. Granted all we have now is a retarded cat, but still, better than just a sci-fi novel.

I guess some people are concerned about ethical dilemmas now that artificial intelligence is becoming less and less of a science fiction topic, but it's always seemed like too far away of a technology for me to bother with finding out the arguments/concerns there.

 

[Dynash]

I remember watching a very old video on YouTube sometime last year or more, where Russian Scientists managed to have a dogs head alive through machines mimicking it's lungs, heart etc.

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.co...cientists-kept-a-dogs-severed-head-alive/1315
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_the_Revival_of_Organisms

All I can say about this cat, well... they are quite behind if the one about the dog is actually real considering theirs isn't even physical.

 

[theraptor]

ever heard of the Iron lungs? machines have been able to do that for a long time. due to the complexity of the human brain, however, the cat thing is far more difficult

 

[themoose]

I remember watching a very old video on YouTube sometime last year or more, where Russian Scientists managed to have a dogs head alive through machines mimicking it's lungs, heart etc.

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.co...cientists-kept-a-dogs-severed-head-alive/1315
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_the_Revival_of_Organisms

All I can say about this cat, well... they are quite behind if the one about the dog is actually real considering theirs isn't even physical.

I saw that video, I don't speak Russian but I don't think they were simulating a brain - just a circulatory system. The dog's features seemed to still react to things such as wind, sound, but I don't think it was through any sort of brain activity.