[drucken]

Understatement.

Even if perfect replication of a neuron electronically was possible, there are 86 billion neurons in an average human brain which is well over ten times the number of transistors present on modern chips.

Of course, functional electronic neuron models and scaling well before that point is likely to be immensely useful anyway.

[Tuna-Fish]

Even if it took a hundred thousand transistors (/transistor-size devices) to emulate a neuron, that wouldn't actually be a problem. Compared to electricity-on-copper, the connections between neurons are slow. When operating on electricity, there are no problems whatsoever in making your brain consist of a million chips that fill a warehouse.

[InclinedPlane]

Indeed. So it might actually be possible to emulate a human brain in hardware rather sooner than we might have thought. Memristors are also memory devices, with access times on the order of modern RAM, and a small multiple of 86 gigabytes is not a huge amount of storage these days. So imagine a 1 billion "neuristor" processor backed by a few hundred GB of memristor storage and operating in a sort of time-shared fashion (load a "brain component" into the neuristor configuration, interface with the memory for a while, then move on to the next component and so forth).