Recent high-profile brain simulations, including those of the 1 billion euro Human Brain Project, are very large and, by some measures, complex. However, they do not exhibit interesting behaviours and so are difficult to compare to much of what we know about the brain.
In this talk, Dr. Eliasmith describes the methods and tools used to construct what is currently the world’s largest *functional* brain simulation, called the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network (Spaun). He demonstrates some of the behaviours the model exhibits and shows that it is similar in many respects to human and animal behaviour. Eliasmith argues that this provides support for the effectiveness of the proposed methods and tools in dealing with complex system synthesis. He concludes with suggestions as to why the tools are effective.
