Trust DARPA to come up with impossible requests – they have just come up with a demand for an accurate computer simulation of a living humanoid brain. As for the purpose of this accurate simulator, it remains to be seen whether DARPA will use it for benign or sinister purposes. This new initiative has been dubbed Reorganization and Plasticity to Accelerate Injury Recovery (REPAIR) – don’t you just love military acronyms? DARPA claims it is all about “understanding how neural-based sensory stimulation could be applied to accelerate recovery from brain injury”. In fact, in DARPA’s terms, this is what they want in the excerpt below.
Creation of an in silico [in a computer, that is, not a bubbling jar with an actual brain in it] bio-computationally accurate model based on collection of multi-region, multi-scale neural activity in a non-human primate performing a complex dexterous task… constructed in such a manner as to allow for analysis of performance metrics, such as, time to target or targets, assessment of accuracy, control of simultaneous degrees of freedom, and learning time for task acquisition…It is expected that the bio computational model employ appropriately sophisticated mathematical analysis to capture the complexity of parallel processing, inter-neural activity, and plastic adaptation within the brain.
Good luck to the team trying to develop something as complex as the human brain, but, “stealth” technology might have been categorized as “crazy” once…
Filed in ..