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Comment by Ancient | Hacker News Reader

Everyone complaining or fussing about how primitive this model is on a browser, ya'll need to chill out and stop taking beautiful work like this for granted. Some of you may say this is easy to do or why didn't he also "do this" or "do that" - how about you help out and make it better ;)

@sethbannon Thanks for the visuals and hard work!

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I think the complaints are fair based on the title of the HN post which indicates that this is a visualization of a biological neural network, which it empathetically is not (it's not a true representation of any kind of neural network, at least not that I know of, but a visualization of graph traversal where the graph happens to look like a brain).

So, it is cool -- extremely pretty -- but fairly misleadingly named in my opinion. It could be more accurately titled, "An artist's rendition of a brain".

I'm not complaining about how primitive it is. I'm complaining about using buzzword when at the end it is just a random network disguised in a brain structure (and I'm just talking about geometry).

There is nothing to do better because better is doing real simulation and we are far from it. https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/

Agree 100% with the sentiment of your comment, but sadly I'm not the author of the visualization. I'm just the OP :-)

I agree, a really cool project which I would imagine could be extended to a "real" model without a ton of work. I imagine the amount of work to fork a javascript library which integrated a network of H-H model neurons to make it output this type of visualization would be far more work than adding the H-H piece to this code. I could be wrong but at first blush, that's how I see it.

I think it would be quite a bit of work to integrate the H-H model or any model of a biological brain with this visualization.

This is because the visualization is basically just a graph, with axons as edges and neurons as nodes, and then signals are propagated with extremely simple graph-traversal style logic. On the other hand, the H-H model tries to deal with the physical reality of the human brain so it is much more complicated and relies on some data (like axon width) that simply doesn't exist here.

It would be possible and potentially interesting, for sure, but probably more work than you might think.

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