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Comment by htrp | Hacker News Reader

I mean you could theoretically copy some really simple animal brains (10k neurons or so) to see how it interacts with the real world in an actual 'in silico' experiment.

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Simulating 10k neurons is absurdly difficult. The only success in this area - and it is far from complete - is simulating C. elegans, a microscopic worm that has 959/1035 cells in total (1035 for males, 959 for hermaphrodites). Of these, 302/385 are simple neural cells (much simpler than a mammalian neuron) [0], and these along with the 95 muscle cells have been simulated mostly in their entirety - mostly, but not completely.

Even so, with 302 neural cells there are ~10k synapses to be simulated (9065/13,758 based on sex). The current status is a simulation taking 5-10 minutes of real time to simulate 15ms of worm time, on a somewhat regular PC[1]. Extrapolate that to 10k neurons...

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6889226/

[1] https://github.com/openworm/OpenWorm

Yup, like with openworm.org :)

That's based on C. elegans which I think that only has 902 neurons. Also I don't think they've ever cloned the state of a living worm, only the connectome. That itself is pretty cool but it seems like what Samsung is talking about would go pretty far beyond that.

Even simpler at 302 for adults, their nervous system is completely mapped out and I'm still incredibly impressed nonetheless by how much technology has progressed in my lifetime to make something like that possible

They embodied the brain in a basic truck type robot, and it's oddly awesome.

https://youtu.be/1wj9nJZKlDk

Since worms usually survive electric shocks (and people usually survive seizures), the connectome is probably enough; there probably isn't anything vital in volatile memory. Less-volatile memory like DNA methylation has been proposed to be a significant memory mechanism at the per-cell level but so far, as I understand it, there is not good evidence for this.

https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.1002/embj.201387637 seems to be an overview of the situation from a few years ago.

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