Last week I wrote about IBM’s announcement that a research team had created the “largest artificial brain ever,” which they compared to the size of a cat’s brain. It turns out that some of these claims may have been hyperbole. Henry Markram, the lead at the Blue Brain Project (which describes itself as the “first comprehensive attempt to reverse engineer the mammalian brain”) wrote a letter to IBM’s Chief Technology Officer pointing out the holes in IBM’s claims, ultimately calling them a “mass deception of the public,” a “hoax,” and a “PR stunt.” Ouch.
In addition to his letter, it seems that Markram has submitted a comment to a story at IEEE Spectrum as a follow-up to his letter where he goes into additional detail. Clearly he’s upset, and if his claims are accurate as they seem, he certainly has a right to be:
IBM’s claim is a HOAX. This is a mega public relations stunt – a clear case of scientific deception of the public. These simulations do not even come close to the complexity of an ant, let alone that of a cat. IBM allows Mohda to mislead the public into believing that they have simulated a brain with the complexity of a cat – sheer nonsense. Here are the scientific reasons why it is a hoax: How complex is their model? They claim to have simulated over a billion neurons interacting. Their so called “neurons” are the tiniest of points you can imagine, a microscopic dot. Over 98% of the volume of a neuron is branches (like a tree). They just cut off all the branches and roots and took a point in the middle of the trunk to represent a entire neuron. In real life, each segment of the branches of a neuron contains dozens of ion channels that powerfully controls the information processing in a neuron. They have none of that. Neurons contain 10′s of thousands of proteins that form a network with 10′s of millions of interactions. These interactions are incredibly complex and will require solving millions of differential equations. They have none of that.
You can read Markram’s original letter and his follow-up comment at IEEE Spectrum.
(H/T Next Big Future)