Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain Likely by 2020



This point where machines surpass human intelligence has been called the "singularity." It's a term that Kurzweil helped popularize through his book.

"The singular criticism of the singularity is that brain is too complicated, too magical and there's something about its properties we can't emulate," Kurzweil told attendees at the Singularity Summit over the weekend. "But the exponential growth in technology is being applied to reverse-engineer the brain, arguably the most important project in history."



The key to reverse-engineering the human brain lies in decoding and simulating the cerebral cortex - the seat of cognition. The human cortex has about 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses.

A supercomputer capable of running a software simulation of the human brain doesn't exist yet. Researchers would require a machine with a computational capacity of at least 36.8 petaflops and a memory capacity of 3.2 petabytes - a scale that supercomputer technology isn't expected to hit for at least three years, according to IBM researcher Dharmendra Modha. Modha leads the cognitive computing project at IBM's Almaden Research Center.

By next year, IBM's ‘Sequoia' supercomputer should be able to offer 20 petaflops per second peak performance, and an even more powerful machine will be likely in two to three years.

"Reverse-engineering the brain is being pursued in different ways," says Kurzweil. "The objective is not necessarily to build a grand simulation - the real objective is to understand the principle of operation of the brain."





But even a perfect simulation of the human brain or cortex won't do anything unless it is infused with knowledge and trained, says Kurzweil.

"Our work on the brain and understanding the mind is at the cutting edge of the singularity," he says.

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Photo: A graphic overlay shows neural connections on a scan of IBM researcher Dharmendra Modha's brain/IBM

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