PC News : Blue Brain Project

In 2005, a project named the Blue Brain Project started to make a digital model of the human brain. Now they say that they will release their artificial brain of this project before 10 years. In the past 15 years, there was a professor who was engaged in this project named Henry Mackram. He is controlling the Blue Brain Project.

At present, the Blue Brain Project is making a digital model of the special area of the brain called the neocortex in the cortex of the brain. The neocortex is more important because it is always developing gradually in the brain. But when we get old, when we have more experience the neocortex changes according to that sense and cause the person to act accordingly. The Blue Brain's idea is to develop a digital system of the communication of information in the nerves too.

Under this, they have made thousands of software models as the neurons of the neocortex. So each of those are a computer program. If we take one of these computer programs, each one does the job of one nerve cell. They have re-created all the processes done by the cell and designed computer programs to do those processes.

When we re-create this the processes in a different form of some equipment or a living being it is called reverse engineering. To operate one of the above mentioned computer program, which were designed using reverse engineering, we need one laptop computer per each program! So to in order to create the model of the neocortex of the brain we need thousands of laptops. That means using a supercomputer is more practical than using many laptops. So that is why they have used, BlueGene, an IBM supercomputer that has ten thousand processors, to the Blue Brain Project.

In one of the lectures of Professor Henry Mackram, he asks they listeners "How many people are there in the world who are mentally ill?" and he himself answered "200,000,00 people" "Do you like them to be cured?'' every body answered "Yes" then he said "Then when we finished making the model of the human brain of the Blue Brain Project, we can do that."

The real aim of the Blue Brain Project is to make medical researches more easier by designing an artificial brain.