A top boffin has penned a scathing letter attacking IBM for bogus science and conning the public over its plan to build a computer that can simulate a cats brain. Neuroscientist Henry Markram, the lead of the "Blue Brain" modeling project at Switzerland's EPFL, blasted the project as a "scam" and a "mass deception of the public."

Dharmendra Modha, manager of IBM's Cognitive Computing unit, told the Supercomputing Conference last Wednesday that he and his team created a simulation of a cat-sized cerebral cortex that included 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. The world applauded and the project won itself the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for extreme cleverness at the show.

But Markam wrote a stiffly worded letter to IBM's technology chief, Bernard Meyerson saying he was shocked at the announcement. Markram claims the cat-brain simulation was a doddle and the "simplest possible equation you can image to simulate a neuron." All it showed was that IBM's Cognitive Computing team has immense compute horsepower at their beck and call, he said. Such simulations are trivial and have been around for decades, and it really is no big deal to simulate a billion points interacting if you have a big enough computer. No qualified neuroscientist on the planet that would agree that this is even close to a cat's brain" and that the announcement is "simply a PR stunt here to ride on Blue Brain."

He added that the fact that the Bell prize would be awarded for such nonsense was beyond belief, and he never realized that such trivial and unethical behavior would actually be rewarded. Markram would have expected an ethics committee to string this guy up by the toes.