{"id":6865,"date":"2015-10-10T21:14:56","date_gmt":"2015-10-11T04:14:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=6865"},"modified":"2015-10-06T09:26:20","modified_gmt":"2015-10-06T16:26:20","slug":"coding-the-mind-from-scratch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2015\/10\/10\/coding-the-mind-from-scratch\/","title":{"rendered":"Coding The Mind From Scratch"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The Washington Post<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Thought process: Building an artificial brain<\/h1>\n

Paul Allen\u2019s $500 million quest to dissect the mind and code a new one from scratch<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Paul Allen has been waiting for the emergence of intelligent machines for a very long time. As a young boy, Allen spent much of his time in the library reading science-fiction novels in which robots manage our homes, perform surgery and fly around saving lives like superheroes. In his imagination, these beings would live among us, serving as our advisers, companions and friends.Now 62 and worth an estimated $17.7 billion, the Microsoft co-founder is using his wealth to back two separate philanthropic research efforts at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence that he hopes will hasten that future.<\/p>\n

The first project is to build an artificial brain from scratch that can pass a high school science test. It sounds simple enough, but trying to teach a machine not only to respond but also to reason is one of the hardest software-engineering endeavors attempted \u2014 far more complex than building his former company\u2019s breakthrough Windows operating system, said to have 50 million lines of code.<\/p>\n

The second project aims to understand intelligence by coming at it from the opposite direction \u2014 by starting with nature and deconstructing and analyzing the pieces. It\u2019s an attempt to reverse-engineer the human brain by slicing it up \u2014 literally \u2014 modeling it and running simulations.<\/p>\n

Made up of 100\u00a0billion neurons, each one connected to as many as 10,000 others, the human brain is the most complex biological system in existence. When you see, hear, touch, taste or think, neurons fire with an electrochemical signal that travels across the synapses between neurons, where information is exchanged.<\/p>\n

Somewhere within this snarl are patterns and connections that make a person who he is \u2014 his memories, preferences, habits, skills and emotions.<\/p>\n

Building on the work that Allen accelerated through his philanthropy, governments around the world have launched their own brain initiatives in recent years. The European Commission\u2019s Human Brain Project, which began in 2013 with about $61 million in initial funding, aims to create an artificial model of the human brain within a decade. President Obama announced the United States\u2019 own BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) effort in 2014 to great fanfare, comparing it to the Human Genome Project that led to the current genetic revolution. BRAIN was launched with initial funding of $110 million.<\/p>\n

Some futurists even believe that the brain, not the body, may be the key to immortality \u2014 that at some point we\u2019ll be able to download our brains to a computer or another body and live on long after the bodies we were born in have decayed.<\/p>\n

Allen\u2019s own interest in the brain began with his love of tinkering.<\/p>\n

He always has been interested in how things were put together, from steam engines to phones, and as he grew older he became fascinated with the brain.<\/p>\n

\u201cComputers are really basically computing elements and a lot of memory,\u201d he said. \u201cThey are pretty easy to understand, as compared to the brain, which was designed by evolution.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t until his mother, Faye, a former elementary school teacher, became ill with Alzheimer\u2019s that Allen\u2019s brain philanthropy took shape.<\/p>\n

[ click to read full article at WaPo<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Washington Post Thought process: Building an artificial brain Paul Allen\u2019s $500 million quest to dissect the mind and code a new one from scratch Paul Allen has been waiting for the emergence of intelligent machines for a very long time. As a young boy, Allen spent much of his time in the library […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6865\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}