The Cortical Column

Let's cut straight to the numbers: We represented a rat-scale cortical model (55 million neurons, 442 billion synapses) in 8TB memory of a 32,768-processor BlueGene/L Dharmendra Modha of IBM's Blue Brain project presented these results yesterday at the Supercomputing 2007 Conference in a paper titled "Anatomy of a Cortical Simulator." (pdf) This is by far the largest simulation in the history of computational neuroscience, trumping their previous mouse-scale model ...

I've always wondered about the properties of intelligence of extraterrestrial life (ET). The question is similar to Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat? (Google)," except perhaps more extreme. The Drake Equation tells us there are likely to be roughly 3 other civilizations in our galaxy alone (Edge Foundation). In our search for ET we typically look for Earth-like planets, based on their spectroscopic profile ...