Complex living brain simulation replicates sensory rat behaviour

theguardian.com

44 points·phreeza··9 comments

http://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(15)01191-5.pdf

Oh man, 20 figures and 38 pages. This one is going to take a while to get through!

[Peter Latham] was more critical of how much the work had cost. He estimates that the simulation cost at least €100m. To reconstruct a whole rat brain would probable take at least €20bn. “That is probably too much, given that what you’re buying is a really expensive rat that might not even be a rat.”

I'm going to put this one on my fridge for a while...

Still cheaper (and more useful) than the F-35 program...

Useful how? What will we do with a virtual rat brain?

Move closer to understanding the human brain.

I'll take that over a billion-dollar flying target any day.

Put it in a robot body and have it patrol high security installations.

It lets us turn on and off different functional parts, to see the effect, so we can reverse engineer it.

We don't have good general theories about how brains work, so a good place to start is from the bottom up.

So assuming the cost to run the simulation follows a basic Moore's law curve, we have about 20 years until a full rat brain simulation costs ~ $10M?

The challenge is to make the technology continue to follow Moore's Law.

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