4 ms·

This article, while obviously PR, is confusing to me. It seems to pin too much emphasis on the nature of its hardware as if that's enough to "emulate" the brain

This article, while obviously PR, is confusing to me. It seems to pin too much emphasis on the nature of its hardware as if that's enough to "emulate" the brain. If they don't have folks at the calibre of Deepmind to drive this thing, can it really go very far? What it could be useful for is neural structure modeling at a more primitive layer, even if the end outcome isn't usable for practical consumption.

dkfellows 8y ago
SpiNNaker is particularly for studying neural structure, especially on the scale from small groups of neurons up to brain structures of a few million, on timespans of a few seconds to a few hours at simulation timesteps on the size order of a millisecond. That's a scale where doing the study in vivo or in vitro is technically extremely challenging; signal analysers find that awkward, either to get that many channels that fine or to get that density of sampling. Or both; getting either is hard and getting both is crazy hard. But being able to simulate neural networks that can do their learning on-line and in real time, all while actively processing input (and in a controlled fashion) is an interesting capability anyway, as it means SpiNNaker can control physical robots in interesting ways (and those may be commercially interesting). And it's low-power enough that doing this in the wild is practical, rather than needing to upload everything into the Cloud for analysis. That may also be commercially interesting.