[gilgoomesh]

> The experiment on simulated human brain activity involved 1.73 billion virtual nerve cells that were connected to 10.4 trillion virtual synapses

So... 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than a human brain. From Wikipedia:

> One estimate puts the human brain at about 100 billion (10^11) neurons and 100 trillion (10^14) synapses

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron#Neurons_in_the_brain

Assuming linear scaling, that would put an actual simulated second of human brain neural activity somewhere between 6 hours and 2 days.

[higherpurpose]

If it's 2 days that puts us about 26 years (2040) away, compared to the original assumption, which would put us 16 years away (2030), assuming "Moore's Law" continues to happen every 18 months (regardless of whether we'll be able to double the number of transistors per same amount of space anymore or not).

[bpicolo]

Except Moore's law most likely isn't continuing for much longer, if it hasn't stopped already.