The human brain is complex, but scientists at the University of Waterloo are making significant strides in "programming" a human brain, according to a study published in the Journal Science.
Lead researcher Chris Eliasmith and his team have crafted a computer model with 2.5 million unique neurons which communicate with one another. CNN notes that "the human brain has about 100 billion neurons, so there's still a long way to go in terms of replicating its full capacity," but the program shows off a level of sophistication as yet unseen in such projects.
"We can show that the performance on (an) intelligence task mimics the kind of performance that you see in people; it gets worse in the same sort of proportion that you find in humans," says neuroscientists Christian Machens. "It's hard to know at this point whether this approach is going to hit some wall that we haven't seen yet, or actually be able to reach that holy grail, as it were, of artificial intelligence."
Eliasmith details the simulation's limitations: "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."
Interestingly, the program's reaction time will eventually, and theoretically, be similar to the human brain.
"All of that kind of thinking will make for the possibility of having agents that are more human-like to interact with," says Eliasmith.