The Human Brain Project Receives Up To $1.34 Billion

New submitter TheRedWheelbarrow writes "The singularity looms as the Human Brain Project gets up to $1.34 billion in funding. 'The challenge in AI is to design algorithms that can produce intelligent behavior and to use them to build intelligent machines. It doesn't matter whether the algorithms are biologically realistic — what matters is that they work — the behavior they produce. In the HBP, we're doing something completely different...we will base the technology on what we actually know about the brain and its circuitry.'"

Finally doing what Microsoft should have done...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

It has the resources. To bad Bill Gates has no imagination at all. Instead, he's using his foundation to pick random problems, followed by piecemeal solutions instead of acquiring a significantly large domain space of practical and solvable problems and addressing them systematically.

Re:Why study the human brain then?

[ColdWetDog]

Yeah.

In the HBP, we're doing something completely different...we will base the technology on what we actually know about the brain and its circuitry.'"

With this approach, they will probably start with nematode brains.

And realize they don't have to go any farther.

Re:Why study the human brain then?

[javilon]

Why study a human brain?

The more ways we attack a given problem, the more chances of success. We have different communities working on different approaches to AI: Statistic, symbolic and biologically inspired. All three have produced interesting results already, meaning they have solved some practical problems.

Also, most human brains can show "intelligent behavior" in certain ways that our latest algorithms can't, e.g. navigating an arbitrary kitchen and finding a beer in the fridge :-)

Another failure in the making.

[TelavianX]

Massive large projects like this almost always end in utter failure. Even the IBM cat brain project failed to accomplish much. Intelligence is much more complicated than a mere randomly connected neural network. I just hope something good comes from this and it is not a total waste.

The problem

[phantomfive]

I absolutely am in favor of basic science research, but looking through their documents, I can't find the answer to this problem.

What is the success metric? They have a system, which is basically a super computer, and they will have it solving some equations. The equations represent some parts of neurons, but not all. How will they know that they've succeeded? The computer isn't going to simulate any real human brain, we don't know what that looks like. We barely know what C. Elegans' looks like. Are they going to use this computer to answer some question? What question?

What are they going to use to know if they've succeeded? Overly-optimistic promises are what killed a lot of AI research around the 1970s.

Re:Why study the human brain then?

[phantomfive]

Human brains may be weak, but the vision recognition algorithms are amazing.