X-Message-Number: 19685
From: 
Date: Sun, 4 Aug 2002 06:12:42 EDT
Subject: Re: CryoNet #19678 Brain reader and CD

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Thomas Donaldson said:
> 
> To read brains AND understand what you have read requires much more
> knowledge of how brains work than we now have. It's also true that
> storage would take much more knowledge. 
> 
> Again, if the purpose of a brain reader is to simply give a copy
> of someone's brain, not only the appearance under one or another
> form of light or radiation, but also the chemistry would have to be
> worked out and stored IN DETAIL. This would take much more than the
> capacity of current CDs because, after all, the copy will in a 
> sense contain far more information than would really be needed to
> recreate the person 

Nobody suggest that the data flow from a brain reader can be storred on a CD 
or even a DVD or a current hard disk. These media have a capacity of: .7 Go, 
2.5 Go and 300 Go respectively. The raw data of a BR amount to something as 
10^21 octets or 1 trillion Go. This is what the electronics must handle. The 
storred part with data compression and discarding irrelevant data may be one 
million times smaller or 1 000 000 Go. This is  3 000 times the capacity off 
a large HD. Given that that capacity x 2 every 1.5 year, a single disk will 
have the capacity in 18 years. If we accept to use 16 disks, this time is 
reduced to 12 years, the minimum delay to build an i-cube.

To exploit these data, we have not to understant a brain, we need only to 
figure out how locally decay products come from and what was the original 
structure.This is a task similar to picture deconvolution. When that is done, 
we can define a coordinate grid with fine meshes and put a virtual molecule 
in that computed space. To have a brain simulation we need "only" to run that 
latice on a computer or network of computers, with all virtual molecules. 
This is the technology used in high energy physics for gauge theory computing 
and simulation. Here too, the processor power is well beyond what we have 
today in a desktop computer. Nevertless it would be on the order of what can 
be at hand in a network 15 years from now.

Yvan Bozzonetti.

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