Most advanced synthetic human brain

Researchers at the Blue Brain Project, operated by the Brain and Mind Institute at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanna, are building an artificial human brain by simulating the operation of and interactions between individual brain cells, or "neurons", inside a supercomputer. In 2008, scientists on the project perfected the software needed to describe the behaviour of a human "neocortical column" – a sub-unit in the brain, consisting of some 10,000 neurons. In 2011, 100 of these virtual neocortical columns were joined together to form a network of a million artificial neurons – the most sophisticated software emulation of a human brain to date. The Blue Brain "lives" on an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer, running at a speed of a million billion FLOPS (floating point operations per second). By comparison, a PC with twin 2 GHz processors might manage 10 billion FLOPS – a factor of 100,000 slower. The team believes that by 2023 they will be able to simulate a complete human brain, a staggeringly complex system consisting of 100 billion neurons with a million billion connections between them.