[LINK] AmA by computational neuroscientists behind 'the world's largest functional brain model'

Not sure if this has been covered on LW, but it seems highly relevant to WBE development. Link here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/147gqm/we_are_the_computational_neuroscientists_behind/

A few questioners mention the Singularity and make Skynet jokes.

The abstract from their paper in Science:

A central challenge for cognitive and systems neuroscience is to relate the incredibly complex behavior of animals to the equally complex activity of their brains. Recently described, large-scale neural models have not bridged this gap between neural activity and biological function. In this work, we present a 2.5-million-neuron model of the brain (called “Spaun”) that bridges this gap by exhibiting many different behaviors. The model is presented only with visual image sequences, and it draws all of its responses with a physically modeled arm. Although simplified, the model captures many aspects of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and psychological behavior, which we demonstrate via eight diverse tasks.

I'm curious to see LWers' perspectives on the project.

Not sure if this has been covered on LW, but it seems highly relevant to WBE development. Link here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/147gqm/we_are_the_computational_neuroscientists_behind/

A few questioners mention the Singularity and make Skynet jokes.

The abstract from their paper in Science:

A central challenge for cognitive and systems neuroscience is to relate the incredibly complex behavior of animals to the equally complex activity of their brains. Recently described, large-scale neural models have not bridged this gap between neural activity and biological function. In this work, we present a 2.5-million-neuron model of the brain (called “Spaun”) that bridges this gap by exhibiting many different behaviors. The model is presented only with visual image sequences, and it draws all of its responses with a physically modeled arm. Although simplified, the model captures many aspects of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and psychological behavior, which we demonstrate via eight diverse tasks.

I'm curious to see LWers' perspectives on the project.

According to my understanding, Spaun is only able to shift between a fixed set of tasks, and according to a fixed algorithm (if the first two inputs are "A1", route the information one way so that it ends up doing one task, and if the first inputs are "A2", route the information another way, etc.) that was manually designed. You haven't explained yet (or emulated) how human brains are able to switch fluidly between an ever changing set of possibe tasks, and without having to be prompted by specific codes such as "A1" and "A2".

If my understanding is correct, I think a clearer and fairer description of your accomplishment might be that you've demonstrated task shifting "on a (simulated) neural substrate that is structually similar to the human brain", rather than task shifting "just like the human brain".

Yup, I'd say that's a fair way of expressing it, although I think we take "neural substrate that is structurally similar to the human brain" much more seriously than other people that use phrases like that. It's a similar enough substrate that if fixes a lot of our parameter values for us, leaving us less open to "fiddle with parameters until it works".

We've also tried to make sure to highlight that it can't learn new tasks, so it's not able to work in the fluid domains people do. It also doesn't have any intrinsic motivation to do th... (read more)

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[LINK] AmA by computational neuroscientists behind 'the world's largest functional brain model'

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[LINK] AmA by computational neuroscientists behind 'the world's largest functional brain model'

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