IBM cat brain simulation dismissed as 'hoax' by rival scientist

IBM researcher Dharmendra Modha last week hailed his company's new simulations as a "tremendous historic milestone" that will ultimately point the way to human-scale brain simulations. But his boast was criticized in an open letter issued by Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project in Switzerland, which is also attempting to reverse-engineer mammalian brains.

"This is light years away from a cat brain, not even close to an ant's brain in complexity," Markram wrote in an open letter which was sent to IBM Fellow and CTO Bernard Meyerson and reprinted on IEEE Spectrum. "It is highly unethical of Mohda to mislead the public in making people believe they have actually simulated a cat's brain. Absolutely shocking."

Read more at The New York Times.

Read original article here.