] Plans to build the "world's biggest spiking neural
] network" to mimic the brain were announced by Mountain
] View, Calif.-based Artificial Development at the
] Accelerating Change Conference on Sunday.
]
] The CCortex system will be a "massive spiking neuron
] network emulation and will mimic the human cortex, with
] 20 billion layered neurons and 2 trillion 8-bit
] connections," according to AD's President and CEO Marcos
] Guillen, listed in the Guardian's "The Young Rich" for
] his former position as Director of Red Internauta of
] Spain, valued at 29.6 million pounds.
]
] The network will run on a 1000-processor supercomputer
] cluster operating at 4.8 teraflops, with 1.5 terabytes of
] RAM and 80 terabytes of storage, he said.

This is about 3 orders of magnitude short of the computational power required to simulate a human brain. By Hans Moravec's estimate, this is about as much power as it would take to simulate a rat's brain -- if one had a good model of how a rat's brain worked. Still, a lot of cognitive science has been done with rats, and if these folks are serious, it could be a step forward.

In the article, critics of this approach say that the 10^15 ops/sec estimated requirement is low by 7 orders of magnitude.