Intelligence Realms Status Update - Feb 13, 2009

[Bok]

We have simulated over 500 billion neurons to date. Because the current applications are stable that gives us more time to continue with the development of the simulator and the other applications. Until we will be able to get more help with the development we will have to release application versions only once in a while, once or twice a year. We have to move on with the development of the simulator. Over the past couple of months we had contacts with quite a few people from various backgrounds, and while they were initially enthusiatic when they found out about the project, after a short while that enthusiasm disappeared. We were supposed to receive support for the project in various forms ranging from support for scientific journal paper submissions to help with application development or the development of the GPU applications, or the making of the video, or the creation of graphic images. While not everybody shares the project goal the fact that so many people were so quick to renege on their words led us to the conclusion that we need to stop all development efforts that are not directly related to AI features, like learning and memory or rule creation and extraction. We took a decision three weeks ago to start implementing some of these features first and then to continue with the regular project development (i.e. scalability first, cellular models second and AI features last). We converted and tried to tie together some of the existing code and we made a small makeshift application, that has none of the scalability that we want to have in the end (i.e. multiple processes, multiple machines, multiple sensors...) and it is merely a single process, single machine, single sensor application. But it does generate neurons and networks based on the sentences inputted in the knowledge acquisition module. We are debugging the application now so we should have something functional within a week or two. This small program will only be capable of learning and retrieving data from its memory. It will also be able to perform searches in data, but because the brain doesn't have a search function we will not call it that. If someone thinks that searching is done in the brain as is done in a computer, it will not have an accurate representation of the truth. Once we have a running version of the small program we will move on to the rule creation and extraction feature. That will take another couple of weeks. Once that is finished as well, we will make a short video of its capabilities. We are considering this small version as a demonstration of the future system capabilities. Afterwards we will continue with the scalability and cellular model implementation and finally the AI features, as it was planned initially. In regards to the GPU application here is its status: we did some work on the GPU application for the ATI cards, we managed to bypass quite a few of technical issues, only to find out that our initial coding approach was wrong. We developed the application for Brook but because the API and the code for detecting the cards wasn't accesible from Brook we had to find another solution. Unfortunately it appeared that the lack of proper documentation was the cause so we asked our contact person from AMD if we can get some support to finalize it. We haven't received any response. We decided that perhaps is better to put that aside for now and look into building the Nvidia CUDA application first. We sent an email asking for some technical help and we received an answer that, that would be OK. After a couple of days we came back and asked for that but it appeared that in the meantime there was a change of mind. At that point we looked around and we found a young researcher who was interested in doing interesting projects with CUDA. He was interested but he didn't had that much time at that moment, around three weeks ago. We are still waiting for his help but if that will not bring some results we will have to pursue that again after we finalize the demonstration application. Time is always of essence so if a task can be delegated or some other help can be found, that would be great. I have been unable to read more than a couple of papers per week since the project started. Going down from tens of papers per week to only a few is a major downside. Development continues to be the top project priority. As soon as we will have a working version of the AI project features, I look forward to store inside the system my research journal pages and notes. That will be an interesting development. For now we will continue with the simulation, but once we reach the 1000 billion neurons simulated we will stop. 10 times the human brain capacity seems a lot and even now the current figures tend to make many people uneased. It is not our intention to do that; we are merely trying for the moment to redefine the possible. Given that the field of brain-computer interfaces is advancing rapidly, the day when our intelligences will be expanded and this gap will dissapear, is not far. Imagine how it will life be, when we will have massive intelligence and understanding. Source Code Downloads: 3909 Teams: 877 Computers: 12135 Participants: 5819

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