Commentary on the Blue Brain Project

Definitely read Christof Koch and Michael Buice's commentary on the Blue Brain Project paper in Cell. They nicely summarize all the important points of the paper and propose a Turing Test for models. The performance of a model can be assessed by how long it would take an experimenter to figure out if the data from proposed neurophysiological experiments was coming from a model or the real thing. I think that this is a nice idea but there is one big difference between the Turing Test for artificial intelligence and brain simulations and that is that everyone has an innate sense of what it means to be human but no one knows what a real brain should be doing. In that sense, it is not really a Turing Test per se but rather the replication of experiments in a more systematic way than is done now. You do an experiment on a real brain then repeat it on the model and see if they get comparable results.