Now this is interesting.

[dfleis]

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_250302.html?menu=news.latestheadlines
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I only wish more information came out about this: does it have "eyes" ? Have they given it a robotic form so that a nervous system could be attached and that it could "feel" and "do" things? And should I stop calling it "it" ?

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Russians create 'artificial human brain'

Russian scientists claim to have developed the first artificial brain with the same intellectual potential as a human.

The neuro-computer is based on the workings of the human brain cell and can out perform previous brain models.

It uses pioneering findings in neurophysiology and neuromorphology to produce a truly thinking machine, scientist Vitaly Valtsev has told the Interfax news agency.

He has warned of the potential of the scientific breakthrough, saying the new brain could turn into a Frankenstein monster if mistreated.

The scientist said: "This machine needs to be trained like a newborn child. It is extremely important for us to make it a friend, not a criminal or an enemy."

Mr Valtsev, a member of the International Academy of Information Science, says the Russians have succeeded where others have failed because they used a model of the neurons in the brain in building the computer.

He says earlier attempts to create advanced artificial intelligence have failed because scientists tried to create a machine using a model of the neuron taken from the spinal cord developed back in the 1940s.

Last updated: 15:42 Sunday 15th April 2001

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[baylor21]

Clearly I think they are jumping the gun by calling this an 'artificial brain.'

After all, can their 'artificial brain' have emotional outputs like a real brain? Thats the real test. Its fairly easy to build a computer based on a neuron model that can stimulate other neurons at a faster rate than human brains can.

But its impossible to create an artificial brain at this point because we dont understand enough about how a real brain works. We know that emotions are caused by differenct areas of the brain firing off neurons in certain patterns, but we dont know exactly what those patterns are and we dont know how the physiological stimulus patterns are initiated.

The only way to know this would be take a living patient and invasively do experiments on a living brain. Of course thats unethical because we don't know how to repair the damage we would do to the brain while studying it that way. But who knows, maybe the Russians have bypassed those ethical bounds and went ahead.

Even so, if what they say is true than they are literally years and years ahead of scientists in the U.S.

Neural networks are not really new and they have become ever more advanced, but artificial emotion has never been elicited from any of these models.

I wish they had put more technical details in the article above. I suspect that if they had, people who know about the science behind it tear their design apart as a pretender to the brain.

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"There is nothing more powerful on this Earth as a man who has nothing to lose. It does not take ten such men to change the world--one will do." Elijah Mohammed