Comment Re:No, it's not even possible (Score 3, Insightful) 181
That it took 90,000 of the best processors slaved together for 40 minutes to simulate the computational power of the human brain for 1 sec?
That makes a ratio of 216,000,000 : 1, on a processor to human brain ratio. That isn't really fair, since a modern processor will use much less energy than the human brain but lets roll with it anyway. That seems insurmountable, but only because it's difficult to appreciate just how much faster and more powerful processors are today than they were even half a decade ago.
That ratio puts us about 11 "doubling" periods away from being able to use a 90,000 cpu cluster to simulate a mind in real time. Historically, the doubling period has been 18-24 months, so that puts it about 20 years away from large scale institutions being able to simulate a facsimile of a human mind. 17 doublings (~30 years) after that, a single processor would have the ability to simulate a human brain.
Now, there's a lot to be argued about there. There's absolutely no guarantee that processor improvement will continue at historical levels (and lots of obvious and less obvious arguments against it). But then again, chip designers have approached "impossible" barriers to improvement many times in the past and have simply changed tacks to go around them. There's no guarantee that the current simulations are at all accurate, perhaps chemical or even quantum processes significantly drive human thought for instance. But then again, 50 years is a long time to perfect the simulations.