Ho New / Reuters

It goes without saying that the human brain is complex, and would be hard to build from scratch. But researchers are looking to simulate how the brain works so that more human-like artificial intelligence can be created and we can better understand damage to our own brains.

Chris Eliasmith of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, led research published in the journal Science on a brain model called SPAUN - the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network.

SPAUN lives inside a computer, can view images with a camera-like eye and can draw responses to questions. For example, show it the number "4" and it will write its own "4." It can even mimic the style of the numeral.

Both in the brain and in SPAUN, neurons communicate by changing their voltages, and the pattern of these voltage "spikes" is what carries information from one cell to another, Eliasmith said. The receiving cell generates a voltage of its own if it receives a particular voltage.

SPAUN has 2.5 million spiking neurons. Neurons are the cells - the individual components - that make up the brain. The human brain has about 100 billion neurons, so there's still a long way to go in terms of replicating its full capacity.

It's hard to compare SPAUN to any existing animal. Monkeys can do more general recognition than what this model does, Eliasmith said. But there are tasks SPAUN does that, until now, it was thought only humans could do.

"It's not as smart as monkeys when it comes to categorization, but it's actually smarter than monkeys when it comes to recognizing syntactic patterns, structured patterns in the input, that monkeys won't recognize," Eliasmith said.

All of SPAUN's tasks involve numbers. For instance, give it the pattern: 1, 11, 111; 3, 33, 333; 4, 44, _____." SPAUN could fill in the blank as 444.

"That's actually part of an intelligence test, realizing that everything is increasing by one," Eliasmith said. "Monkeys actually won't figure that out."

Read the original here:

Designers study human brain, neuron actions