I heard the story of how the magpie tried to instruct other birds, particularly the wood pigeon, on how to build nests in a different form but the lesson was much the same.
The EC Brain project reminds me of the wood pigeon hearing “…take two sticks…” and running off to build its nest.
With no understanding of the human brain, the EC set out to build one, on a ten year deadline.
Byron Spice’s report in: Project Aims to Reverse-engineer Brain Algorithms, Make Computers Learn Like Humans casts further doubt upon that project:
Carnegie Mellon University is embarking on a five-year, $12 million research effort to reverse-engineer the brain, seeking to unlock the secrets of neural circuitry and the brain’s learning methods. Researchers will use these insights to make computers think more like humans.
The research project, led by Tai Sing Lee, professor in the Computer Science Department and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), is funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) through its Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) research program. MICrONS is advancing President Barack Obama’s BRAIN Initiative to revolutionize the understanding of the human brain.
“MICrONS is similar in design and scope to the Human Genome Project, which first sequenced and mapped all human genes,” Lee said. “Its impact will likely be long-lasting and promises to be a game changer in neuroscience and artificial intelligence.”
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Artificial neural nets process information in one direction, from input nodes to output nodes. But the brain likely works in quite a different way. Neurons in the brain are highly interconnected, suggesting possible feedback loops at each processing step. What these connections are doing computationally is a mystery; solving that mystery could enable the design of more capable neural nets.
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My goodness! Unknown loops in algorithms?
The Carnegie Mellon project is exploring potential algorithms, not trying to engineer the unknown.
If the EC had titled its project the Graduate Assistant and Hospitality Industry Support Project, one could object to the use of funds for travel junkets but it would otherwise be intellectually honest.