Your 1,5 kg
brain consumes 30 watt. A computer model: 40,000 ton consuming 4 Gigawatt
You certainly
heard stories about computers 80 billion neurons plus 80 billion glia, brings
the total number of brain cells that help us to process data to about ± 160 billion, or 160,000
million. This is 48 times more than the number of people on earth
connected to the Internet in 2012. It is half the number of all the stars in
the Milky Way.
The neurons
that play the lead role are linked with 1,000 to 400,000 other neurons. This gives us more than 8 quadrillion ever
changing connections if we take an
average of 100.000 connections. At the tip of each connection we have a kind of
chemical transistors (vesicles) that make a connection when the current in the
cell reaches a particular threshold. If we take an average of 50 active ones,
this means that we have 400 quadrillion transistors in our brain. Are you still with me?
If one of you is a mathematician, I’d love you to compute
how many possible combinations and permutations are possible with 8 quadrillion
connections. I am totally lost in these astronomical numbers.
The human brain
is so mind-boggling in fact that even for a human brain it is, for the time
being, impossible to fully understand it. spiNNaker is one of the most sophisticated
brain simulators. It’s unbelievable yet true: The inventors of a computer that
primitively mimics 1% of the brain are proud that their custom-built chips use
only 1 Watt each, and that the computer, when finished, will consume only
50,000 Watt and weigh only 900 pounds[1].
Hence a computer that very primitively mimics the working of a human brain would
be the size of a big plane hangar, weigh a massive 40,000 tons and consume
roughly all the megawatts of 4 nuclear power plants. And yet you carry more
than that amount of computing power around in your skull as only 3 pounds of
wetware consuming a mere 30 Watt!
Do you agree
now that the human brain is utterly amazing, totally unique and still far
superior to the fantastic Information and Communication Technology we built?
Prof Dr Theo Compernolle's most recent book is "BRAINCHAINS. Discover your brain and unleash its full potential in a hyperconnected multitasking world".
Available at Amazon.com or a bookstore near you. More info at www.BrainChains.org
Prof Dr Theo Compernolle's most recent book is "BRAINCHAINS. Discover your brain and unleash its full potential in a hyperconnected multitasking world".
Available at Amazon.com or a bookstore near you. More info at www.BrainChains.org
[1] SpiNNaker: A 1-W 18-Core System-on-Chip for
Massively-Parallel Neural Network Simulation. S.B. Painkras, E.; Plana, L.A.; Garside, J.;
Temple, S.; Galluppi, F.; Patterson, C.; Lester, D.R.; Brown, A.D.;
Furber, Solid-State Circuits, IEEE
Journal of, Issue Date: Aug. 2013,
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/icp.jsp?arnumber=6515159
Power analysis of
large-scale, real-time neural networks on SpiNNaker. Evangelos Stromatias,
Francesco Galluppi, Cameron Patterson and Steve Furber. 2013. neuromorphs.net .
https://www.neuromorphs.net/nm/raw-attachment/wiki/2013/uns13/Power_analysis_of_large_scale_real_time_neural_networks_on_SpiNNaker.pdf
Improving the Interconnection
Network of a Brain Simulator. Jonathan Heathcote. 2013
http://jhnet.co.uk/misc/phdFirstYearReport.pdf
SpiNNaker: A 1-W
18-Core System-on-Chip for Massively-Parallel Neural Network Simulation.
Painkras, E.; Plana, L.A.; Garside, J.; Temple, S.; Galluppi, F.; Patterson,
C.; Lester, D.R.; Brown, A.D.; Furber, S.B. Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Journal
of, Issue Date: Aug. 2013
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