10 ms·

Can The Human Brain Project be saved, and should it be?

108 points by Fede_V 12y ago

_almosnow 12y ago
Good to see that time puts everything in its place.
api 12y ago
"A strong personality..." I've seen a good number of boondoggles. At the center of each was a personality of such magnetism that people simply fell in line behind them. There are people who have the ability to spout utter nonsense, but to do so with such alpha authority that nearly everyone in the room just glazes over and nods. Whatever it is that our brains take as a signal of alpha status, these people know how to crank it to 11. When are people going to learn that primate dominance gestures are not a reliable proxy for much else? I will say that when actual merit and this level of dominance actually align in the same individual, amazing things can happen. But I see no sign that this is more common than would be predicted by the random assortment of traits.
- ploxiln 12y ago
  That sort of thing really doesn't affect nearly everybody. But those people which it doesn't affect, leave the project, or are pushed out. So it's a self-selecting/reinforcing thing, which is what makes it problematic, I think.
  - api 12y ago
    In the end you basically end up with a cult of personality around the charismatic leader.
valevk 12y ago
Why are such projects always coordinated as one big blob? Isn't it possible to just fund startups that are active in this industry, and see which one survives? Of course there should be regulation to a specific degree. VCs are doing the same, and it seems to be working (for the VCs).
- fabian2k 12y ago
  They aren't, there are many small grants for scientific research. You just don't read about those in newspapers.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > VCs are doing the same, and it seems to be working (for the VCs). Well, you don't want that in science. The point of startups (from VC's point of view) is to make money for VC - startups themselves and their survival is irrelevant. The point of research is to gain knowledge and not to make money. That's two completely different kinds of thinking.
  - _almosnow 12y ago
    >The point of research is to gain knowledge and not to make money. Hahahahahahaha. Joke aside, I haven't seen "science just for the sake of science" ever.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Go to your local university then, talk to an older physics professor.
- edran 12y ago
  Because in Europe the belief that important and wide research should be carried out by "public" research is much stronger than, say, USA. Also while we have seen a somewhat invading process of privatisations ( :( ), European universities are still largely owned publicly and financed via public funding, therefore most [public] moeny for research should and will be directed to them for the time being. You could then argue that it's not as efficient as the VC model, but: - I haven't seen any study confirming such thing - It doesn't seem easy to achieve a reasonable compromise between open research and R&D protectionism unless you are a big company - Academia, even with all its politics and problems, is still a fast and active environment for scientific research EDIT: typesetting
Udo 12y ago
The Human Brain Project is a brute force attempt at solving AI (and biological) research problems, and as such it's certainly not alone. I recall supercomputers being put to use in simulating just one neuron at the molecular level. The difference being of course that we do have enough modeling data to make the single neuron simulation fly in principle, whereas the entire brain is ridiculously out of scope. The main problem with the project though is not the missing scientific data - that just makes it unfeasible for now. What makes it unfeasible in any context is the detail level at which the simulation is supposed to be carried out. This quote from the article expresses it better than I could have done: Eero Simoncelli, a neuroscientist at New York University. "Would you try to understand the universe by simulating every molecule? What would you have achieved? It’s going to be just as complicated as the real thing and you won’t understand it any better."
- cubetime 12y ago
  Agreed that it's unfeasible for now, of course, but I'm a little amazed people aren't seeing the uses of this. We can edit, directly observe, and record/playback simulated brains. We can test ten million different models on top of a recorded simulation and see which one fits best. Eero doesn't think we could learn about how the brain works by simulating a trillion slightly different permutations on a brain, or (maybe more ethically) small subsystems of a brain, and observing how each behaves? Sweet god, the economic implications! http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/uploads.html http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/uploads.html Horrifying, maybe, but I don't see how people can get away with suggesting this will never be valuable to anyone.
  - Udo 12y ago
    I think you might be misunderstanding the intent of my argument a bit. > I'm a little amazed people aren't seeing the uses of this. That's not the issue - I imagine everyone here would like to see these goals reached. Nobody has to sell anyone on the rewards of neuro research. The question is merely whether this specific project can deliver them. > We can edit, directly observe, and record/playback simulated brains. The idea itself is a good one. However, the key issue becomes choosing an appropriate level of detail for the simulation. I believe a blanket choice of "let's just do the entire brain" is computationally infeasible right now, plus we don't have good enough models to actually program the thing - but most importantly even in a future where these problems are solved the device seems like a blunt and unwieldy instrument that won't give up its data easily. > or (maybe more ethically) small subsystems of a brain That's what's already happening all over the world right now, in thousands of independently scoped simulations and experiments.
albertzeyer 12y ago
Can someone explain a bit about the problems? I am not a Neuroscientist but a Machine Learning researcher, and given the recent results in Deep Learning / Artificial Neural Networks which reach Human performance in certain specific tasks, it almost looks like if you would just put an ANN together which is somewhat big enough and somewhat similar wired together as the Human brain, you would yield something similar. And the point is, it doesn't really matter at all whether that is exactly like in the Human brain, and also, you don't really need to understand in detail how it will work, like you can even not really explain the current simple ANNs. It just works anyway. So, under this view, it's just a matter of scaling up, and to wait until we have enough computing power. And then, you would add more details to make it more close to the real Human brain.
- sz4kerto 12y ago
  As an ML practitioner, you certainly know that the ANNs you use have not much in common with biological (real) NNs. First, ANNs tend to be mostly feedforward, while rNNs are highly recurrent. ANNs are therefore not very good in tasks where memory is needed (I know about the developments involving LSTM neurons, but they are not analogous to the implicit memory of recurrent neural networks.) Second, ANNs usually don't have a time dimension, the firing is essentially a floating point value instead of action potential. Third, recurrent neural network structures do not scale: an efficient/reliable/reduntant system of 100B neurons will probably have extremely different structures than another one with 100M neurons -- because of recurrency and other stuff a rNN is a chaotic process (in the sense of sensitivity to parameters) that should be stabilized by the structure. And there are many-many other differences. Note that our task is not to solve problems but to figure out how the brain works. Also, recurrent neural network simulation cannot really be scaled right now, we don't have the hardware. It is not parallelizable with our current tools because of the huge number of connections. (Disclaimer: I was involved in a project trying to model real neural networks. It wasn't a huge success, but we learned a lot.)
  - creamyhorror 12y ago
    This is a good informed summary, thank you. I asked the same question of my Alzheimer researcher friend, and he gave a pretty similar response including aspects like the huge computational requirements and the basic non-similarity of rNNs and ANNs (albeit with a disclaimer that he wasn't in the field). Nonetheless, I look forward to seeing more simple rNNs being created over time (besides the C. elegans one that was modeled recently). Who knows what strange organizational rules or structures we will discover from this strand of research?
Simp 12y ago
The entire point of the "Future and Emerging Technologies" FET Flagship program (where the HBP got it's money) was to fund risky, daring and ambitious technology projects. Here's an article about the Human Genome Project from 1990: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/05/science/great-15-year-project-to-decipher-genes-stirs-opposition.html http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/05/science/great-15-year-proj... "The critics argue that the human genome project has been sold on hype and glitter, rather than its scientific merits, and that it will drain talent, money and life from smaller, worthier biomedical efforts." "They also doubt that the project can be completed in anything close to its original deadline and budget." "it will have generated enormous reams of uninterpretable and often useless data" "it's hyped science" "Everybody I talk to thinks this is an incredibly bad idea" "Some critics have begun aggressive letter-writing campaigns" The exact same arguments that were used 25 years ago to discredit the HGP are now resurfacing to criticize the HBP. And with genome sequencing now below 1000$, that article has become almost laughable.
- oskarth 12y ago
  Not everyone agrees that the HGP was a success. Here's Freeman Dyson's take on it: https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/565998871957233664 https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/56599887195723366...
  - michaelhoffman 12y ago
    That was Freeman Dyson's take on it 18 years ago, before it was finished.
- savanaly 12y ago
  Just because the HGP turned out to be worthwhile doesn't mean funding it in the right place was the correct decision. If the expected value of the HGP was below the opportunity cost it should not have been funded. That the actual value turned out to be higher than the opportunity cost is irrelevant. To say it another way, I think that playing the lotto with the goal of earning money is a mistake. The fact that some people win it and in fact make money doesn't change the fact that they were wrong to play it in the first place if their goal was net gain of money. That said I have no idea what the expected value of the HGP was so I have no idea whether it was a good decision. I just want to chime in in support of thinking about the probabilities involved in the right way.
crazypyro 12y ago
http://www.bioworld.com/content/computer-science-vs-biology-heart-human-brain-project-division http://www.bioworld.com/content/computer-science-vs-biology-... I was curious why there was only neuroscientists and biologists quoted so I went looking for another source. I think this link gives a different, broader overview of the situation and doesn't only focus on personal attacks. Specifically neuroscience subproject funding was removed... This seems like angry academics that lost funding are trying to derail it through the media to my uneducated observance...
- orbifold 12y ago
  I think the overall problem is that traditional neuro scientists and biologists bring virtually none of the required skills to the table. Moreover while neuroscience is able to show pretty pictures of brain activity, they have made insufficient progress in understanding it. On the other hand the physicists/mathematicians that have invaded the field have a background in computational methods, simulation and hardware development. So for example a group at the University I studied had previous experience designing analog chips for feature detection in High Energy Physics, a number of years ago they re-branded themselves as a neurophysics group and recently landed a ~100 million euro+ grant in the context of the Human Brain Project. It is also much easier to learn the jargon and read some of the softer phenomenological articles than to develop a sound understanding of the underlying mathematics and physics.
  - aheilbut 12y ago
    It is also much easier to conjure up some entertaining but biologically meaningless mathematical model than to spend years doing real biological experiments. I think the overall problem is that the physicists and the biologists don't have respect for each other's skills and knowledge.
    - orbifold 12y ago
      Obviously a biologist will have lots of knowledge and skills a physicist doesn't have. Mathematical models can be very useful even if they don't model the real world faithfully, as long as they capture part of the behavior to some precision. Physicists spend an extraordinary amount of time studying toy models to build up intuition, which together with an understanding how to proceed in more complicated solutions can be very useful. For example even though most real world EM problems won't have the symmetries required to come up with a closed form solution, the intuition gained from studying toy examples is still invaluable. In the case of neurons you can model the membrane of the neuron and the interior and exterior to various degrees of accuracy as an EM problem, if you wish you can even add surface defects. Since the temperature is high, all quantum effects are essentially washed out, as are the need to model individual calcium ions etc., at least to first approximation. After the dust settles you can come up with a few effective parameters that model one neuron and an ODE that models its dynamics. As it turns out the ODE indeed exhibits dynamics similar to real world neurons in response to electric stimuli. If you then couple those ODEs into larger system and try different coupling configurations (the coupling coefficients model the synapses between neurons), you have come up with a simplified model for parts of a brain.
streptomycin 12y ago
I always figured it would make sense to try something like C. elegans first before jumping right into simulating the human brain. Progress has been slow on that front: http://www.jefftk.com/p/whole-brain-emulation-and-nematodes http://www.jefftk.com/p/whole-brain-emulation-and-nematodes
sambe 12y ago
As others have pointed out there is a long anecdotal history of magnetic personalities getting hype and funding based on their empty promises. However, there are large counterexamples and this article clearly contains little technical criticism (another commenter links to a more balanced view). The Human Genome Project is cited as one such example: simultaneously not meeting the hyped goals whilst also being more successful than imagined in other ways. Perhaps what people are missing here is that the value may not be in simulating the brain but rather having the infrastructure on which to run simulations. This likely starts in parts and on a small scale but the infrastructure alone could be incredibly useful for generating new ideas and shortening feedback time.
geographomics 12y ago
This document detailing the overall vision of the project is worth a read: https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/documents/10180/17646/Vision+Document/8bb75845-8b1d-41e0-bcb9-d4de69eb6603 https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/documents/10180/17646/Visio... I'd be very surprised if they come anywhere near reaching their goal of a comprehensive whole-brain simulation, but even if the overall project aim falls short, many of the sub-projects are likely to provide worthwhile outcomes. For example, structural and functional data generation projects described in there (SP1, SP2 and SP3) sound reasonable and reflect the kinds of topics and techniques that are being researched already. The neuroinformatics (SP5) and medical informatics platforms (SP8), while very ambitious, seem like they could be a tremendously useful resource for linking disparate data sets together into a single, more easily-accessible database. I can see why many neuroscientists are scoffing at the rather over-hyped grand aim of the project, but that doesn't mean the entire thing should be scrapped. Personally I think that funding comparatively open-ended, long-term, risky research is a good thing. Even if it 'fails', that failure is informative in itself in helping to provide scope for future projects. And it increases the opportunity for serendipitous discoveries.
araes 12y ago
Not a neuroscientist (never thought I'd use NANS), and this may well be the boondoggle of a charismatic man who's using it to buy yachts and laugh at the EU. That said, the one benefit I could see is that it's a billion+ motivation for folks to think about a hard problem. They likely won't accomplish a 100 billion neuron sim, but 100's to 1000's of people will hopefully be thinking about that goal, trying to decompose it, and producing useful sub-advances. Maybe like the HGP or the LHC or space flight, intense money will lead to enabling technologies that accelerate what is possible. The other problem is that humans are horrible at predicting scientific progress, even in fields they are comfortable / experts in. Edge scientists may actually suffer from this the worst. So much of life has been devoted to becoming an expert in the field that it becomes more challenging to consider large changes. Even while most major breakthroughs are built from analogies to other fields, and more "simple" every day phenomena. Ex: Relativity, one of the weirdest advances ever, came from thought about trains. Maybe a billion+ could be spent more wisely, but at least they're spending it. These are the same folks who decry our governments whenever they reduce funding and malign the sciences. Stop complaining and find a way to write the grant, or meet the right folks, or whatever's necessary so you can be a part of the money train and get something useful done.
rokhayakebe 12y ago
I am sensing Dan Brown just got some material for his next book.
fiatmoney 12y ago
For a vastly smaller-scale version of this, check out OpenWorm. http://www.openworm.org http://www.openworm.org It defies understanding why one wouldn't start with a much simpler organism rather than trying to go directly to the human brain. For one thing, you can actually experiment on, e.g., a rat brain in a way that you can't on humans.
- monk_e_boy 12y ago
  I guess you don't know unless you try.
- comex 12y ago
  The HBP plan does include simulating the mouse brain as an intermediate objective.
- cr4zy 12y ago
  Hugely excited about OpenWorm! More great stuff about the robotic embodiment of OpenWorm: http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/7985-a-worms-mind-in-a-lego-body.html http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligenc... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745639 Eyewire.org is also really cool -- for example, they have already made an important discovery into how our eyes detect motion: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/online-gamers-help-crack-mystery-of-how-eyes-sense-motion/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/online-gamers-help...
TheHeasman 12y ago
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, (s)he is almost certainly right. When (s)he says it is impossible (s)he is very probably wrong." - Arthur C Clarke
- SapphireSun 12y ago
  The reason these scientists are upset is because we are no where near being able to do this. They're not saying we can't do it someday, just that it's a crazy waste of money right now. We don't know enough about the brain to make reasonable full scale models of it yet.
  - deleted 12y ago
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scottlocklin 12y ago
I have a book from 1968 where this was proposed as an inevitability by the 1980s. The same author (it was sponsored by the foreign policy association) assumed ray guns and antigravity were highly likely.
orblivion 12y ago
This kind of research is walking head first into an ethical nightmare. I say stay the hell away.
- SapphireSun 12y ago
  Why do you think that?
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Would you like to give the vote to something that can be mass produced and qualifies as intelligent?
    - SapphireSun 12y ago
      That's an interesting question. We already have that problem though, ever heard of humans? ;) Typically we deal with it by having a waiting period of 18 years from birth (balanced by death) or a green card to citizenship process that takes a while and is limited in number. On the other hand, would simulated humans even need much of a vote? I think their primary needs would be satisfied by simulated satisfaction. The only thing they they would need-need in the physical world would be for us humans to not pull the plug on them and to service their hardware when it fails. Much easier to deal with than real live humans. Just a few real humans might be needed to maintain entire cities of these people. It sounds like a great sci-fi story to grant a real-world franchise to a few elected officials in the sim-city and keep the truth hidden from the sim-citizens.
  - Filligree 12y ago
    A simulation of a human brain is a human being, and human experiments are generally considered unethical. To say nothing of the possibilities if they succeed.
    - memming 12y ago
      Well, it will call for evolution in the ethical system. It's not an excuse to not simulate "brains" or build artificially intelligent systems.
koerding 12y ago
Some more in depth comments about the HBP that go beyond the Chronicle article: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-main-objections-to-the-human-brain-project/answer/Konrad-Koerding?__snids__=795167122%2C817538217&__nsrc__=2 http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-main-objections-to-the-hum...
aheilbut 12y ago
The marketing and salesmanship of the Human Brain Project may have been a little too successful for its own good. On one hand, the idea that simply building a giant brain simulation would be possible or scientifically useful is not currently realistic. However, I don't think they (Markram et al.) are that naive. In reality, the project is composed of a lot of different subprojects, in simulation, neuromorphic computing, mapping/characterizing mouse and human brains and doing actual neuroscience, theory, applications to human disease, even philosophy and ethics, etc. see: https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/discover/the-project/sub-projects https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/discover/the-project/sub-pr... and their list of publications so far https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/science/publications https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/science/publications It's a huge umbrella for neuroscience funding that they marketed to the EU under the grand vision of simulating the brain. Whether or not this kind of marketing/funding mechanism is an optimal way to do the best science is a very legitimate issue to debate. But the implication (which the HBP brought upon themselves..) that a bunch of crackpots have been given a billion dollars to buy supercomputers and run nonsensical simulations is an oversimplification.
deleted 12y ago
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Aqueous 12y ago
The example given by the NYU neuroscientist seems to be betray some misunderstanding/lack of vision: "Would you try to understand the universe by simulating every molecule? What would you have achieved? It’s going to be just as complicated as the real thing and you won’t understand it any better." At the very least you would have achieved the ability to rewind and play the universe forward again, which is something that we most certainly can't do with our real universe. You would also have achieved the ability to experiment with and measure the universe with potentially greater precision than we can in the physical world. Simulation is a tool to help you understand, not understanding itself. I don't think Markram ever said anything to the contrary.
grondilu 12y ago
> "Would you try to understand the universe by simulating every molecule? What would you have achieved? It’s going to be just as complicated as the real thing and you won’t understand it any better." I'm pretty sure cosmologists would love to make simulations to a molecular precision. They currently simulate gas clouds with supercomputers in order to study the formation of galaxies and the more precise the better.
- TheEzEzz 12y ago
  Absolutely right, simulations are critical in physics, cosmology, and pretty much every hard science. I think the nay-saying in the article is indicative of a larger enmity some academics have towards simulation based science. The harder sciences have mostly come to terms with the contributions simulations can make, but I think it will be sometime before the softer disciplines come around. In the meantime, politics and ad hominems as usual.
Animats 12y ago
A reasonable near-term goal is to get OpenWorm [1] to work well in simulation. That's the simplest known organism with a system of neurons, and the connections have been fully mapped out. Until that works, there's little point in trying anything more complex. The "the next step is the human brain" people have a poor track record. Rodney Brooks tried that once. He'd done a good reactive-controller insect, and then immediately tried to jump to human-brain level with Cog.[2] When he gave a talk at Stanford proposing Cog some years ago, I asked him "Why not try for a mouse next? That might be within reach." He said "I don't want to go down in history as the man who created the world's best artificial mouse". Cog was an embarrassing failure. The Human Brain Project should be put on hold until OpenWorm works and that technology has been advanced to at least the lizard level. The Human Brain Project is likely to turn into an expensive supercomputer boondoggle. [1] http://www.openworm.org/ http://www.openworm.org/ [2] http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/cog/cog.html http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/cog/c...
- oco101 12y ago
  Sure please take a look at this an tell me if you see any similarities (1990): http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/05/science/great-15-year-project-to-decipher-genes-stirs-opposition.html http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/05/science/great-15-year-proj...
  - Animats 12y ago
    That was about sequencing DNA. It was known how to sequence DNA before the Human Genome Project started. It just cost too much and was too slow. That was a production scaling problem. If we ever get to a mouse brain, it's just scaling from there - all the mammals have very similar DNA. We don't know how to make even a good lizard brain yet. Or even a full insect nervous system.
- simonster 12y ago
  The work and challenges for OpenWorm may not reflect the work and challenges for the Human Brain Project. Among other things, unlike most other neurons, C. elegans neurons don't spike. Action potentials make simulation more tractable since you only have to worry about propagating spikes, and not all internal state, between connected neurons. (At least ignoring things like ephaptic coupling, which is probably not that important in mammalian neocortex.) Also worth noting that the Blue Brain project supposedly succeeded in simulating 100 neocortical columns, which is 1 million neurons, vs. 302 neurons in C. elegans.
marmaduke 12y ago
There are alternative approaches that attack the problem of simulating the human brain with a smarter set of approximations, e.g. http://thevirtualbrain.org http://thevirtualbrain.org

108 points by Fede_V 12y ago

Good to see that time puts everything in its place.

api 12y ago

"A strong personality..." I've seen a good number of boondoggles. At the center of each was a personality of such magnetism that people simply fell in line behind them. There are people who have the ability to spout utter nonsense, but to do so with such alpha authority that nearly everyone in the room just glazes over and nods. Whatever it is that our brains take as a signal of alpha status, these people know how to crank it to 11. When are people going to learn that primate dominance gestures are not a reliable proxy for much else? I will say that when actual merit and this level of dominance actually align in the same individual, amazing things can happen. But I see no sign that this is more common than would be predicted by the random assortment of traits.

ploxiln 12y ago
That sort of thing really doesn't affect nearly everybody. But those people which it doesn't affect, leave the project, or are pushed out. So it's a self-selecting/reinforcing thing, which is what makes it problematic, I think.
- api 12y ago
  In the end you basically end up with a cult of personality around the charismatic leader.

valevk 12y ago

Why are such projects always coordinated as one big blob? Isn't it possible to just fund startups that are active in this industry, and see which one survives? Of course there should be regulation to a specific degree. VCs are doing the same, and it seems to be working (for the VCs).

fabian2k 12y ago
They aren't, there are many small grants for scientific research. You just don't read about those in newspapers.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
> VCs are doing the same, and it seems to be working (for the VCs). Well, you don't want that in science. The point of startups (from VC's point of view) is to make money for VC - startups themselves and their survival is irrelevant. The point of research is to gain knowledge and not to make money. That's two completely different kinds of thinking.
- _almosnow 12y ago
  >The point of research is to gain knowledge and not to make money. Hahahahahahaha. Joke aside, I haven't seen "science just for the sake of science" ever.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Go to your local university then, talk to an older physics professor.
edran 12y ago
Because in Europe the belief that important and wide research should be carried out by "public" research is much stronger than, say, USA. Also while we have seen a somewhat invading process of privatisations ( :( ), European universities are still largely owned publicly and financed via public funding, therefore most [public] moeny for research should and will be directed to them for the time being. You could then argue that it's not as efficient as the VC model, but: - I haven't seen any study confirming such thing - It doesn't seem easy to achieve a reasonable compromise between open research and R&D protectionism unless you are a big company - Academia, even with all its politics and problems, is still a fast and active environment for scientific research EDIT: typesetting

Udo 12y ago

The Human Brain Project is a brute force attempt at solving AI (and biological) research problems, and as such it's certainly not alone. I recall supercomputers being put to use in simulating just one neuron at the molecular level. The difference being of course that we do have enough modeling data to make the single neuron simulation fly in principle, whereas the entire brain is ridiculously out of scope. The main problem with the project though is not the missing scientific data - that just makes it unfeasible for now. What makes it unfeasible in any context is the detail level at which the simulation is supposed to be carried out. This quote from the article expresses it better than I could have done: Eero Simoncelli, a neuroscientist at New York University. "Would you try to understand the universe by simulating every molecule? What would you have achieved? It’s going to be just as complicated as the real thing and you won’t understand it any better."

cubetime 12y ago
Agreed that it's unfeasible for now, of course, but I'm a little amazed people aren't seeing the uses of this. We can edit, directly observe, and record/playback simulated brains. We can test ten million different models on top of a recorded simulation and see which one fits best. Eero doesn't think we could learn about how the brain works by simulating a trillion slightly different permutations on a brain, or (maybe more ethically) small subsystems of a brain, and observing how each behaves? Sweet god, the economic implications! http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/uploads.html http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/uploads.html Horrifying, maybe, but I don't see how people can get away with suggesting this will never be valuable to anyone.
- Udo 12y ago
  I think you might be misunderstanding the intent of my argument a bit. > I'm a little amazed people aren't seeing the uses of this. That's not the issue - I imagine everyone here would like to see these goals reached. Nobody has to sell anyone on the rewards of neuro research. The question is merely whether this specific project can deliver them. > We can edit, directly observe, and record/playback simulated brains. The idea itself is a good one. However, the key issue becomes choosing an appropriate level of detail for the simulation. I believe a blanket choice of "let's just do the entire brain" is computationally infeasible right now, plus we don't have good enough models to actually program the thing - but most importantly even in a future where these problems are solved the device seems like a blunt and unwieldy instrument that won't give up its data easily. > or (maybe more ethically) small subsystems of a brain That's what's already happening all over the world right now, in thousands of independently scoped simulations and experiments.

albertzeyer 12y ago

Can someone explain a bit about the problems? I am not a Neuroscientist but a Machine Learning researcher, and given the recent results in Deep Learning / Artificial Neural Networks which reach Human performance in certain specific tasks, it almost looks like if you would just put an ANN together which is somewhat big enough and somewhat similar wired together as the Human brain, you would yield something similar. And the point is, it doesn't really matter at all whether that is exactly like in the Human brain, and also, you don't really need to understand in detail how it will work, like you can even not really explain the current simple ANNs. It just works anyway. So, under this view, it's just a matter of scaling up, and to wait until we have enough computing power. And then, you would add more details to make it more close to the real Human brain.

sz4kerto 12y ago
As an ML practitioner, you certainly know that the ANNs you use have not much in common with biological (real) NNs. First, ANNs tend to be mostly feedforward, while rNNs are highly recurrent. ANNs are therefore not very good in tasks where memory is needed (I know about the developments involving LSTM neurons, but they are not analogous to the implicit memory of recurrent neural networks.) Second, ANNs usually don't have a time dimension, the firing is essentially a floating point value instead of action potential. Third, recurrent neural network structures do not scale: an efficient/reliable/reduntant system of 100B neurons will probably have extremely different structures than another one with 100M neurons -- because of recurrency and other stuff a rNN is a chaotic process (in the sense of sensitivity to parameters) that should be stabilized by the structure. And there are many-many other differences. Note that our task is not to solve problems but to figure out how the brain works. Also, recurrent neural network simulation cannot really be scaled right now, we don't have the hardware. It is not parallelizable with our current tools because of the huge number of connections. (Disclaimer: I was involved in a project trying to model real neural networks. It wasn't a huge success, but we learned a lot.)
- creamyhorror 12y ago
  This is a good informed summary, thank you. I asked the same question of my Alzheimer researcher friend, and he gave a pretty similar response including aspects like the huge computational requirements and the basic non-similarity of rNNs and ANNs (albeit with a disclaimer that he wasn't in the field). Nonetheless, I look forward to seeing more simple rNNs being created over time (besides the C. elegans one that was modeled recently). Who knows what strange organizational rules or structures we will discover from this strand of research?

Simp 12y ago

The entire point of the "Future and Emerging Technologies" FET Flagship program (where the HBP got it's money) was to fund risky, daring and ambitious technology projects. Here's an article about the Human Genome Project from 1990: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/05/science/great-15-year-project-to-decipher-genes-stirs-opposition.html http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/05/science/great-15-year-proj... "The critics argue that the human genome project has been sold on hype and glitter, rather than its scientific merits, and that it will drain talent, money and life from smaller, worthier biomedical efforts." "They also doubt that the project can be completed in anything close to its original deadline and budget." "it will have generated enormous reams of uninterpretable and often useless data" "it's hyped science" "Everybody I talk to thinks this is an incredibly bad idea" "Some critics have begun aggressive letter-writing campaigns" The exact same arguments that were used 25 years ago to discredit the HGP are now resurfacing to criticize the HBP. And with genome sequencing now below 1000$, that article has become almost laughable.

oskarth 12y ago
Not everyone agrees that the HGP was a success. Here's Freeman Dyson's take on it: https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/565998871957233664 https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/56599887195723366...
- michaelhoffman 12y ago
  That was Freeman Dyson's take on it 18 years ago, before it was finished.
savanaly 12y ago
Just because the HGP turned out to be worthwhile doesn't mean funding it in the right place was the correct decision. If the expected value of the HGP was below the opportunity cost it should not have been funded. That the actual value turned out to be higher than the opportunity cost is irrelevant. To say it another way, I think that playing the lotto with the goal of earning money is a mistake. The fact that some people win it and in fact make money doesn't change the fact that they were wrong to play it in the first place if their goal was net gain of money. That said I have no idea what the expected value of the HGP was so I have no idea whether it was a good decision. I just want to chime in in support of thinking about the probabilities involved in the right way.

crazypyro 12y ago

http://www.bioworld.com/content/computer-science-vs-biology-heart-human-brain-project-division http://www.bioworld.com/content/computer-science-vs-biology-... I was curious why there was only neuroscientists and biologists quoted so I went looking for another source. I think this link gives a different, broader overview of the situation and doesn't only focus on personal attacks. Specifically neuroscience subproject funding was removed... This seems like angry academics that lost funding are trying to derail it through the media to my uneducated observance...

orbifold 12y ago
I think the overall problem is that traditional neuro scientists and biologists bring virtually none of the required skills to the table. Moreover while neuroscience is able to show pretty pictures of brain activity, they have made insufficient progress in understanding it. On the other hand the physicists/mathematicians that have invaded the field have a background in computational methods, simulation and hardware development. So for example a group at the University I studied had previous experience designing analog chips for feature detection in High Energy Physics, a number of years ago they re-branded themselves as a neurophysics group and recently landed a ~100 million euro+ grant in the context of the Human Brain Project. It is also much easier to learn the jargon and read some of the softer phenomenological articles than to develop a sound understanding of the underlying mathematics and physics.
- aheilbut 12y ago
  It is also much easier to conjure up some entertaining but biologically meaningless mathematical model than to spend years doing real biological experiments. I think the overall problem is that the physicists and the biologists don't have respect for each other's skills and knowledge.
  - orbifold 12y ago
    Obviously a biologist will have lots of knowledge and skills a physicist doesn't have. Mathematical models can be very useful even if they don't model the real world faithfully, as long as they capture part of the behavior to some precision. Physicists spend an extraordinary amount of time studying toy models to build up intuition, which together with an understanding how to proceed in more complicated solutions can be very useful. For example even though most real world EM problems won't have the symmetries required to come up with a closed form solution, the intuition gained from studying toy examples is still invaluable. In the case of neurons you can model the membrane of the neuron and the interior and exterior to various degrees of accuracy as an EM problem, if you wish you can even add surface defects. Since the temperature is high, all quantum effects are essentially washed out, as are the need to model individual calcium ions etc., at least to first approximation. After the dust settles you can come up with a few effective parameters that model one neuron and an ODE that models its dynamics. As it turns out the ODE indeed exhibits dynamics similar to real world neurons in response to electric stimuli. If you then couple those ODEs into larger system and try different coupling configurations (the coupling coefficients model the synapses between neurons), you have come up with a simplified model for parts of a brain.

streptomycin 12y ago

I always figured it would make sense to try something like C. elegans first before jumping right into simulating the human brain. Progress has been slow on that front: http://www.jefftk.com/p/whole-brain-emulation-and-nematodes http://www.jefftk.com/p/whole-brain-emulation-and-nematodes

sambe 12y ago

As others have pointed out there is a long anecdotal history of magnetic personalities getting hype and funding based on their empty promises. However, there are large counterexamples and this article clearly contains little technical criticism (another commenter links to a more balanced view). The Human Genome Project is cited as one such example: simultaneously not meeting the hyped goals whilst also being more successful than imagined in other ways. Perhaps what people are missing here is that the value may not be in simulating the brain but rather having the infrastructure on which to run simulations. This likely starts in parts and on a small scale but the infrastructure alone could be incredibly useful for generating new ideas and shortening feedback time.

geographomics 12y ago

This document detailing the overall vision of the project is worth a read: https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/documents/10180/17646/Vision+Document/8bb75845-8b1d-41e0-bcb9-d4de69eb6603 https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/documents/10180/17646/Visio... I'd be very surprised if they come anywhere near reaching their goal of a comprehensive whole-brain simulation, but even if the overall project aim falls short, many of the sub-projects are likely to provide worthwhile outcomes. For example, structural and functional data generation projects described in there (SP1, SP2 and SP3) sound reasonable and reflect the kinds of topics and techniques that are being researched already. The neuroinformatics (SP5) and medical informatics platforms (SP8), while very ambitious, seem like they could be a tremendously useful resource for linking disparate data sets together into a single, more easily-accessible database. I can see why many neuroscientists are scoffing at the rather over-hyped grand aim of the project, but that doesn't mean the entire thing should be scrapped. Personally I think that funding comparatively open-ended, long-term, risky research is a good thing. Even if it 'fails', that failure is informative in itself in helping to provide scope for future projects. And it increases the opportunity for serendipitous discoveries.

araes 12y ago

Not a neuroscientist (never thought I'd use NANS), and this may well be the boondoggle of a charismatic man who's using it to buy yachts and laugh at the EU. That said, the one benefit I could see is that it's a billion+ motivation for folks to think about a hard problem. They likely won't accomplish a 100 billion neuron sim, but 100's to 1000's of people will hopefully be thinking about that goal, trying to decompose it, and producing useful sub-advances. Maybe like the HGP or the LHC or space flight, intense money will lead to enabling technologies that accelerate what is possible. The other problem is that humans are horrible at predicting scientific progress, even in fields they are comfortable / experts in. Edge scientists may actually suffer from this the worst. So much of life has been devoted to becoming an expert in the field that it becomes more challenging to consider large changes. Even while most major breakthroughs are built from analogies to other fields, and more "simple" every day phenomena. Ex: Relativity, one of the weirdest advances ever, came from thought about trains. Maybe a billion+ could be spent more wisely, but at least they're spending it. These are the same folks who decry our governments whenever they reduce funding and malign the sciences. Stop complaining and find a way to write the grant, or meet the right folks, or whatever's necessary so you can be a part of the money train and get something useful done.

rokhayakebe 12y ago

I am sensing Dan Brown just got some material for his next book.

fiatmoney 12y ago

For a vastly smaller-scale version of this, check out OpenWorm. http://www.openworm.org http://www.openworm.org It defies understanding why one wouldn't start with a much simpler organism rather than trying to go directly to the human brain. For one thing, you can actually experiment on, e.g., a rat brain in a way that you can't on humans.

monk_e_boy 12y ago
I guess you don't know unless you try.
comex 12y ago
The HBP plan does include simulating the mouse brain as an intermediate objective.
cr4zy 12y ago
Hugely excited about OpenWorm! More great stuff about the robotic embodiment of OpenWorm: http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/7985-a-worms-mind-in-a-lego-body.html http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligenc... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745639 Eyewire.org is also really cool -- for example, they have already made an important discovery into how our eyes detect motion: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/online-gamers-help-crack-mystery-of-how-eyes-sense-motion/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/online-gamers-help...

TheHeasman 12y ago

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, (s)he is almost certainly right. When (s)he says it is impossible (s)he is very probably wrong." - Arthur C Clarke

SapphireSun 12y ago
The reason these scientists are upset is because we are no where near being able to do this. They're not saying we can't do it someday, just that it's a crazy waste of money right now. We don't know enough about the brain to make reasonable full scale models of it yet.
- deleted 12y ago
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scottlocklin 12y ago

I have a book from 1968 where this was proposed as an inevitability by the 1980s. The same author (it was sponsored by the foreign policy association) assumed ray guns and antigravity were highly likely.

orblivion 12y ago

This kind of research is walking head first into an ethical nightmare. I say stay the hell away.

SapphireSun 12y ago
Why do you think that?
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Would you like to give the vote to something that can be mass produced and qualifies as intelligent?
  - SapphireSun 12y ago
    That's an interesting question. We already have that problem though, ever heard of humans? ;) Typically we deal with it by having a waiting period of 18 years from birth (balanced by death) or a green card to citizenship process that takes a while and is limited in number. On the other hand, would simulated humans even need much of a vote? I think their primary needs would be satisfied by simulated satisfaction. The only thing they they would need-need in the physical world would be for us humans to not pull the plug on them and to service their hardware when it fails. Much easier to deal with than real live humans. Just a few real humans might be needed to maintain entire cities of these people. It sounds like a great sci-fi story to grant a real-world franchise to a few elected officials in the sim-city and keep the truth hidden from the sim-citizens.
- Filligree 12y ago
  A simulation of a human brain is a human being, and human experiments are generally considered unethical. To say nothing of the possibilities if they succeed.
  - memming 12y ago
    Well, it will call for evolution in the ethical system. It's not an excuse to not simulate "brains" or build artificially intelligent systems.

koerding 12y ago

Some more in depth comments about the HBP that go beyond the Chronicle article: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-main-objections-to-the-human-brain-project/answer/Konrad-Koerding?__snids__=795167122%2C817538217&__nsrc__=2 http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-main-objections-to-the-hum...

aheilbut 12y ago

The marketing and salesmanship of the Human Brain Project may have been a little too successful for its own good. On one hand, the idea that simply building a giant brain simulation would be possible or scientifically useful is not currently realistic. However, I don't think they (Markram et al.) are that naive. In reality, the project is composed of a lot of different subprojects, in simulation, neuromorphic computing, mapping/characterizing mouse and human brains and doing actual neuroscience, theory, applications to human disease, even philosophy and ethics, etc. see: https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/discover/the-project/sub-projects https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/discover/the-project/sub-pr... and their list of publications so far https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/science/publications https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/science/publications It's a huge umbrella for neuroscience funding that they marketed to the EU under the grand vision of simulating the brain. Whether or not this kind of marketing/funding mechanism is an optimal way to do the best science is a very legitimate issue to debate. But the implication (which the HBP brought upon themselves..) that a bunch of crackpots have been given a billion dollars to buy supercomputers and run nonsensical simulations is an oversimplification.

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Aqueous 12y ago

The example given by the NYU neuroscientist seems to be betray some misunderstanding/lack of vision: "Would you try to understand the universe by simulating every molecule? What would you have achieved? It’s going to be just as complicated as the real thing and you won’t understand it any better." At the very least you would have achieved the ability to rewind and play the universe forward again, which is something that we most certainly can't do with our real universe. You would also have achieved the ability to experiment with and measure the universe with potentially greater precision than we can in the physical world. Simulation is a tool to help you understand, not understanding itself. I don't think Markram ever said anything to the contrary.

grondilu 12y ago

> "Would you try to understand the universe by simulating every molecule? What would you have achieved? It’s going to be just as complicated as the real thing and you won’t understand it any better." I'm pretty sure cosmologists would love to make simulations to a molecular precision. They currently simulate gas clouds with supercomputers in order to study the formation of galaxies and the more precise the better.

TheEzEzz 12y ago
Absolutely right, simulations are critical in physics, cosmology, and pretty much every hard science. I think the nay-saying in the article is indicative of a larger enmity some academics have towards simulation based science. The harder sciences have mostly come to terms with the contributions simulations can make, but I think it will be sometime before the softer disciplines come around. In the meantime, politics and ad hominems as usual.

Animats 12y ago

A reasonable near-term goal is to get OpenWorm [1] to work well in simulation. That's the simplest known organism with a system of neurons, and the connections have been fully mapped out. Until that works, there's little point in trying anything more complex. The "the next step is the human brain" people have a poor track record. Rodney Brooks tried that once. He'd done a good reactive-controller insect, and then immediately tried to jump to human-brain level with Cog.[2] When he gave a talk at Stanford proposing Cog some years ago, I asked him "Why not try for a mouse next? That might be within reach." He said "I don't want to go down in history as the man who created the world's best artificial mouse". Cog was an embarrassing failure. The Human Brain Project should be put on hold until OpenWorm works and that technology has been advanced to at least the lizard level. The Human Brain Project is likely to turn into an expensive supercomputer boondoggle. [1] http://www.openworm.org/ http://www.openworm.org/ [2] http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/cog/cog.html http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/cog/c...

oco101 12y ago
Sure please take a look at this an tell me if you see any similarities (1990): http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/05/science/great-15-year-project-to-decipher-genes-stirs-opposition.html http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/05/science/great-15-year-proj...
- Animats 12y ago
  That was about sequencing DNA. It was known how to sequence DNA before the Human Genome Project started. It just cost too much and was too slow. That was a production scaling problem. If we ever get to a mouse brain, it's just scaling from there - all the mammals have very similar DNA. We don't know how to make even a good lizard brain yet. Or even a full insect nervous system.
simonster 12y ago
The work and challenges for OpenWorm may not reflect the work and challenges for the Human Brain Project. Among other things, unlike most other neurons, C. elegans neurons don't spike. Action potentials make simulation more tractable since you only have to worry about propagating spikes, and not all internal state, between connected neurons. (At least ignoring things like ephaptic coupling, which is probably not that important in mammalian neocortex.) Also worth noting that the Blue Brain project supposedly succeeded in simulating 100 neocortical columns, which is 1 million neurons, vs. 302 neurons in C. elegans.

marmaduke 12y ago

There are alternative approaches that attack the problem of simulating the human brain with a smarter set of approximations, e.g. http://thevirtualbrain.org http://thevirtualbrain.org