IBM Simulates a Cat-Like Brain: AI or Shadow Minds for Humans?

IBM's new cat brain simulation is both more — and less — than it seems.


A real-time computer-simulated cat brain? Could IBM have come up with a project more likely to trigger Internet excitement?

For the handful of you who missed the news, IBM's Almaden Research Center announced this week that it had produced a "cortical simulation" of the scale and complexity of a cat brain. This simulation ran on one of IBM's "Blue Gene" supercomputers, in this case at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). (An aside: LLNL is best known as the center for ongoing research into advanced nuclear weapons and related projects; if the lab is now turning its attention to brain simulations, I don't know whether to be happy that it's moving away from weapons or worried that it will try to weaponize AI.)

Worries about the Robopocalypse may be only partially tongue-in-cheek, but it's worth taking a moment to examine what exactly has happened here. This is what the IBM press release says about the simulation:


This isn't a simulation of a cat brain, it's a simulation of a brain structure that has the scale and connection complexity of a cat brain. It doesn't include the actual structures of a cat brain, nor its actual connections; the various experiments in the project filled the memory of the cortical simulation with a bunch of data, and let the system create its own signals and connections. Put simply, it's not an artificial (feline) intelligence, it's a platform upon which an A(F)I could conceivably be built.

Long-time readers may be having a deja vu moment here, and for good reason. The same team responsible for the cat-scale brain sim created a mouse-scale brain sim a few years ago. One of the researchers, Dharmendra Modha, runs a blog on cognitive computing, and has posted a PDF of the research paper on this project. If you want the hard-core science, not just a press release, have fun.

brain bluegene



But the reality is that in many ways the IBM team has done the easy part, and still has a far greater challenge ahead of them. As I said in response to the mouse sim announcement in 2007, the brain isn't simply a haphazard mass of neural junctions; a functional structure simulation may well prove to be a far greater task than simply getting the neural connection sim working. Don't expect to be able to upload your cat's brain into your Roomba any time soon.


I CAN HAS SINGULARITY? by Jamais Cascio, Creative Commons Licensed
Brain meets BlueGene from "The Cat Is Out of the Bag: Cortical Simulations with 109 Neurons, 1013 Synapses" by Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, Steven K. Esser, Horst D. Simon, and Dharmendra S. Modha.

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  • Henry Markram

    IBM's claim is a HOAX.


    Here are the scientific reasons why it is a hoax:

    How complex is their model?

    Is it nonetheless the biggest simulation ever run?

    Is the simulator they built a big step?

    Did they learn anything about the brain?

    Why did they get the Gordon Bell Prize?

    But is there any innovation here?



    Would other neuroscientists agree with you?

    But did Mohda not collaborate with neuroscientists?

    But did you not collaborate with IBM?


    Henry Markram
    Blue Brain Project