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Comment by PaulKeeble | Hacker News Reader

Going to need a significant improvement in the software to get it to map a human. The fruit flu has 140,000 neurons and 54.5 million synapses and the AI that mapped it required a post process with humans checking it all with 3 million edits and they still have to identify every neuron type.

A human brain has about 86 billion neurons and quite likely many trillions of synapses and that is likely an underestimate. That 3 million edits will turn into 3 million * 10^6 at least manual edits, that doesn't seem feasible. The error rate on the fruit flu would have to come down into the single digits to be usable to map a human brain. So an improvement from about 6% of synapses to 0.000006%. That is one heck of a jump in improvement for an AI.

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Cartographers have mapped Scotland. [random scribe muses that] The whole world could be next.

Did a rough calculation, it would be more like Edinburgh.

There's easily a century between the earliest accurate map of Edinburgh and the earliest accurate map of the world. And even at present, the accuracy of maps of Edinburgh is much greater than the accuracy of maps of the world.

So yeah, the whole world could be next. But the person you're replying to has a point when they say significant improvements are needed.

We did map a handful of brains yet, the more we do the better we will get at it.

I don't understand all this rushing and skepticism when such amazing science is being done. It's not like some AI company marking claims to sell a product, it's some researchers trying to accomplish something. Yes, they should (and probably will) do it better but that's not the goal here.

If 3 million manual edits are still doable then it's ok. And when the manual step is not feasible, a jump in the tech will be required.

> Did a rough calculation, it would be more like Edinburgh.

To put a fine point on the difference in scale:

Edinburgh[0]: 264 square km

Earth[1]: 510,000,000 square km

0 - https://www.britannica.com/place/Edinburgh-Scotland

1 - https://www.universetoday.com/25756/surface-area-of-the-eart...

This reminds me of the coastline paradox. I wonder if it applies to mapping an organism’s brain. For example, one can say they know the length of Scotland’s coastline but as the resolution increases, so does the coastline’s length. It’s infinite.

The resolution increases but the information doesn't. Apply some compression algorithm on the higher resolution coastline and you will find that you can reduce size massively. Same with LLMs and same with mapping the brain probably.

Why would the information not increase? If your unit is, say, 10 meters, you would only be able to see a straight line instead of curve.

You seem to have called it a fruit flu twice... Was that a typo or do you actually mean to call it a flu instead of a fly?!

maybe he just has big fingers.

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