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Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I read "petascale" and thought, oh, we must be nearly there. Then I saw "one cubic millimeter"! Oh my, we still have a long ways to go.

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Does anyone know how big an ant or butterfly's brain is? They do things that are pretty mindblowing in my book with those spec of dust sized brains.

They do!

But their lifespan is way shorter and their number is way higher; which means way more feedback from darwinistic evolution.

To me it means their 'intelligent' behavior should be much more a function of being hardcoded in the neuron layout at the genetic level than being in a generic intelligent meat processor at an emergent level.

Much like ASICs vs CPUs.

I think ants may have similar brain size to fruit flys, which we have previously reconstructed. I'm not sure about the butterfly.

You can check out a complete fruit fly brain here:

https://fafb-ffn1.storage.googleapis.com/landing.html

Or half of a fruit fly brain that has been more fully reconstructed:

https://www.janelia.org/project-team/flyem/hemibrain

I honestly don't know the answer to this, but how large would it be if we tried to do the same thing to a modern CPU? Map our way backwards from its structure instead of the underlying logic?

CPUs are much much more (understandably to us?) structured than the brain. We still don't know if there are repeated canonical cortical micro-circuits. Seems like there should be, but it's still an open research question.

I would assume so as well, but that doesn't mean if we were trying to analyze it this same way, by "building a connectome" of the CPU, the map would also be extremely large, larger than the amount of data necessary to understand/replicate it at least.

My core point is that the size of this dataset is amazing but, possibly, unrelated to how close or how far away from understanding the brain's behavior.

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