In the above image the right screen is the main screen. Its gray top half is a 3 dimensional space where the brain circuits will appear. One will be able to fly a camera around in this space to examine the neural activity and select various neurons for editing.

The lower blue area is another 3 dimensional space where virtual animals will appear for testing their brains against the environment. This will not be in for the first release of this software. Right now it show an underwater environment.

The left screen is the secondary screen showing 3 floatable windows which can be placed anywhere on either screen. The two small windows on the right show the action potential responses of two spontaneously active neurons. The little dots represent the neural charge in the neuron's cell body (or in theoretical terms the analog potential state). When the charge reaches the threshold value the neuron releases and action potential

The large window on the left shows the main neuron creation menu. The background of the moon is simply the image I have on my computer at the moment.

Initial Simulation Time Study

The following table gives the data for the intial simulation times run on a rather old 2.4 MHz Pentium computer using one or two spontaneously active neurons. What is significant is that adding another neuron when neither have their signals displayed does not increase the simulation time ratio of 3.2. This means that the simulation should scale up well to large numbers of neurons. The main source of simulation time is the overhead.

This simulation overhead is increased significantly by displaying the neuron signals. This increases the ratio to 4 with one display and then to 5.1 with two displays indicating that the ratio increases an average of 0.9 per display. The display lag should be much less with the upcoming Vista and hopefully non-existent in dual core computers with a multi-threaded program.