Entirely not conscious in this case. My research does not focus on consciousness, or the ability of the brain to learn or make decisions. We just simulate how the machinery, if you will, that makes up the brain deteriorates due to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's or dementia. The aim is to understand the mechanism of decay, so that a pharmaceutical giant can develop a drug to counteract the effect.
IBM's Watson, on the other hand, I wouldn't be so sure. =)
You're totally right, of course - most aspects of the brain are still very poorly understood. Some extra compute wouldn't go amiss though. We are working on setting up a BOINC project for our lab.
I, as one of the oldest Gridcoin community members, will contribute once you are up and running!!
We might be able to find a solution to that ever present worry as one gets older , neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's or dementia ..
How far away are you from getting the project up and running?
Courtesy of @joshoeah
That's fantastic! Of course, we would have to get whitelisted first.
The project is actually already up and running internally. The problem is that our simulation type (stepping through time and space) does not lend itself well to distributed computing. This is because it is hard to chop the work into many small units. I am working to minimise the error associated with this compute method to acceptable levels, while also keeping compute time as short as possible.