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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

The first sentence literally says why it's not just due to count of neurons.

In August 2014, IBM announced that it had built a “brain-inspired” computer chip—essentially a computer that was wired like an organic brain, rather than a traditional computer.

That's not to say it is equivalent to a rat-brain, there will obviously be differences in efficiency of components and portions that aren't replicated correctly or just plain done differently, but your analogy is no better than what you accused the article of.

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While you are correct that the count of neurons is not the only thing the synthetic brain has to boast, merely saying 'wired like a rat brain' is not really much extra.

It does not speak to the complexity of the network. I interpreted that line as 'connected in the same topology' but immediately thought, yeah right, they definitely don't have the same 'branching factor' as a real rat brain. (not sure of the correct words here, but some real neurons have many thousands to millions of connections).

...so the phrase "wired like an organic brain" is enough to brush off any skepticism?

It'd be rather impressive if it actually did a large number of things that rats do, but a testing environment for that is rather hard to arrange. In the absence of a "rat benchmark" you can build anything and say it's wired like a rat's brain.

I never said it didn't deserve criticism, just that the criticism is not absolved of the responsibility to make useful, supported arguments as well.

I thought the GP post had a point that could be made, but I think they went about it sloppily, and the analogy used in the criticism was hyperbolic in the opposite direction as the article. The article's title was mostly link-bait, but there were some weak assertions in the article that tried to back it up. The sibling comment at your level by avoid3d actually does a good job of trying to address some specifics problems of the claim, and if something similar to that was at the top level, I would either not bothered to reply, or actually looked into the criticisms by researching the chip if my interest was piqued (and if not beat to it by a useful reply from someone else). That's much more useful for discussion.

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