Can a computer be programmed to simulate a brain?

It’s a question mathematicians, theoreticians and experimentalists have long been asking — whether spurred by a desire to create artificial intelligence (AI) or by the idea that a complex system such as the brain can be understood only when mathematics or a computer can reproduce its behaviour.

To try to answer it, investigators have been developing simplified models of brain neural networks since the 1940s.

In fact, today’s explosion in machine learning can be traced back to early work inspired by biological systems.

However, the fruits of these efforts are now enabling investigators to ask a slightly different question: could machine learning be used to build computational models that simulate the activity of brains?

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