Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain Likely by 2020    This point
where machines surpass human intelligence has been called the
"singularity." It's a term that Kurzweil helped popularize
through his book.  "The singular criticism of the singularity is
that brain is too complicated, too magical and there's something
about its properties we can't emulate," Kurzweil told attendees
at the Singularity Summit over the weekend. "But the exponential
growth in technology is being applied to reverse-engineer the
brain, arguably the most important project in history."    The
key to reverse-engineering the human brain lies in decoding and
simulating the cerebral cortex - the seat of cognition. The
human cortex has about 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion
synapses.  A supercomputer capable of running a software
simulation of the human brain doesn't exist yet. Researchers
would require a machine with a computational capacity of at
least 36.8 petaflops and a memory capacity of 3.2 petabytes - a
scale that supercomputer techn