Singularity Updates -

The Swiss University team Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and IBM have teamed up to create a high-resolution simulation of the mammalian brain. The project will use a Blue Gene supercomputer operating at 22.8 trillion floating-point operations per second (22.8 teraflops), one of the fastest in the world. The goal is a detailed 3-dimensional model of the entire neocortex, based on developing an accurate model of the neurocolumns making up the cortex, then duplicating those columns to create a complete map.

Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has announced plans to begin building the world's fastest supercomputer in 2006, to be completed by 2011. The supercomputer would be capable of operating at 10 petaflops, or 10 quadrillion calculations per second, roughly 73 times faster than IBM's Blue Gene, the world's present record holder. This value would exceed the estimates by a number of experts for human brain-equivalent computing capacity. Kyodo news reports that the total cost of the project will fall somewhere between 80 billion and 100 billion yen, or $714 million and $893 million.

Traditional measures of human intelligence would often be inappropriate for systems that have senses, environments, and cognitive capacities very different from our own.

So Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter at the Swiss Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Manno-Lugano, have drafted an idea for an alternative test which will allow the intelligence of vision systems, robots, natural-language processing programs or trading agents to be compared and contrasted despite their broad and disparate functions.

It would measure the AI's ability to carry out complex tasks within its particular environment and then comparing the complexity of its environment with those of a wide range of other AI systems.

Seven member countries of the OECD's Global Science Forum have launched the have set up the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility to promote international collaboration among scientists and create new ways of sharing and analyzing data in the new neuroinformatics research field.

The project will promote international collaboration in the management of neuroscience data and associated knowledge databases, create new internationally agreed analytical and modeling tools, develop mathematical/computational models of brain function, and promote the development of standards, guidelines, ontologies and software tools to facilitate interoperability across multiple computing platforms.

National Institute of Standards and Technology scientists have succeeded in storing information in in single beryllium ions for 10 seconds --more than 100,000 times longer than in previous experiments on the same ions.

They achieved this by using a different pair of the ions' internal energy levels to represent 1 and 0 than was used in the group's previous quantum computing experiments.

This new set of quantum states is unaffected by slight variations in magnetic fields, which previously caused memory losses in ions stored in electromagnetic traps.

The new approach enables qubits to maintain superpositions over 1 million times longer than might be needed to carry out the information processing steps in a future quantum computer. The advance is, therefore, an important step toward the goal of designing a fault-tolerant quantum computer because it significantly reduces the computing resources needed to correct memory errors.

NIST scientists also demonstrated that pairs of entangled ions can retain their quantum states for up to about 7 seconds.

An online game called Peekaboom, devised by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, harnesses the brain power of players to train a set of powerful vision recognition algorithms.

Reports on the death of artificial intelligence were greatly exaggerated. Get ready for nanobots in the body that root out disease and keep us young.

We can meet the hardware requirements for "strong" AI -- machine intelligence with the full range of human intelligence -- by 2020, says Ray Kurzweil.

"I figure we need about 10 quadrillion calculations a second to provide a functional equivalent to all the regions of the brain. IBM's Blue Gene/L computer is already at 100 trillion. If we plug in the semiconductor industry's projections, we can see that 10 quadrillion calculations a second will be available for $1,000 by around 2020.

"So now the controversy is focused on the algorithms. To understand the principles of human intelligence we need to reverse-engineer the human brain. Here progress is far greater than most people realize. The spatial and temporal resolution of brain scanning is progressing at an exponential rate, roughly doubling each year. Scanning tools can see individual interneuronal connections and watch them fire in real time. We already have mathematical models and simulations of a few dozen regions of the brain, including the cerebellum, which comprises more than half the neurons. It is reasonable to conclude that in two decades we will have effective models for most of the brain."

Constantinos Mavroidis, director of the Computational Bionanorobotics Laboratory at Northeastern University in Boston, visualizes a kind of "spider's web" of hair-thin tubes packed with bio-nanotech sensors across dozens of miles of terrain as a way to map the environment of some alien planet in great detail.

Another concept he proposes is a "second skin" for astronauts to wear under their spacesuits that would use bio-nanotech to sense and respond to radiation penetrating the suit, and to quickly seal over any cuts or punctures.

Chris Phoenix of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology has done a feasibility study of nanoscale manufacturing with a desktop nanofactory.

The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) funded these projects.

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