IBM announced last week that they had achieved recreating a cat’s brain with a supercomputer. Accoridng to Forbes, it simulates a cat’s brain that is “about the equivalent of a cat’s cortex, or 4.5% of a human brain.”
Previously they did a rat brain simulation project in 2007, but now they claimed to have broken their record by running 147,456 processors and 144 terabytes of memory to replicate the cerebral cortex of a cat’s brain.
They stated that the entire program ran 100 times slower than the actual cat cerebral cortex and they were still trying to figure out how to make the virtual brain more effective in handling complex and ambiguous data. The IBM searchers think that it will take at least a decade for them to finally get to simulate a human brain.
Soon after IBM made their announcement. The story had its surprising turn. A leading neuroscientist called the project an utter scam.
The leader of the Blue Brain Project called the whole thing a “PR stunt” that IBM was trying to pull. It was a “mass deception of the public.” Henry Markram, the guy from the Blue Brain Project mentioned in an email to the IBM CIO that the project has not even reached the stage of achieving an ants brain, let alone mimicking a cat’s brain.
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