Waterloo Scientists Build World's Largest Simulation of a Functioning Brain

Codenamed SPAUN - or the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network, is a research project of the folks over at the University of Waterloo. And they've achieved a remarkable feat of creating the world's biggest simulation of a functioning brain. This model is the largest because it has about 2.5 million neurons and each neuron's details are captured. These details include how the volts are generated in every cell and how the communication happens. Brain, as we very well know, is a hub of complex activity. And Spaun has attempted to simulate this activity, by processing the visual images to control an arm that draws Spaun's answers to perceptual, cognitive and motor tasks.

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Spaun is different than other brain models because it carries out multiple tasks. The scientists show the model a few patterns of alphanumeral and it processes it to writes responses correctly. This looks like some concrete step towards empowering machine intelligence, doesn't it? Well, Spaun imitates the human brain so brilliantly that it can be seen memorizing numbers list at a time and next it will recognize an object. Moreover, this model has been instrumental in generating ideas for developing new algorithms. We congratulate the team and look forward to more updates on this one.

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