The EPFL?s contribution to the Blue Brain Project will be to create a digital description of how the columns behave. The database from its Brain Mind Institute will provide the raw material for the simulation. Biologists and computer scientists will then connect the artificial nerve cells up in a way that mimics nature. They will do so by assigning electrical properties (电性能) to them, and telling them how to communicate with each other and how they should modify their connections with one another depending on their activity.

　　That_will_be_no_mean_feat. Even a single nerve cell is complicated, not least because each one has about 10,000 connections with others. And nerve cells come in great variety — relying, for example, on different chemical transmitters to carry messages across those connections. Eventually, however, a digital representation of an entire column should occur.

　　Assuming that the growth of computing power continues to follow Moore?s Law, the leader of IBM?s side thinks it should be practical to mimic an entire human brain in silico this way in ten to fifteen years. Such an artificial brain would, of course, be a powerful research tool. It would allow neurological experiments that currently take days in a “web lab” to be conducted in seconds. The researchers hope that their simulated brain will reveal the secrets of how certain psychiatric and neurological disorders develop. But that is probably not the real reason for doing it. The most interesting question, surely, is whether such an artificial brain will be intelligent, or conscious, or both.

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