brainwire

Neuralink Compression Challenge

Summary

content.neuralink.com/compression-challenge/data.zip is one hour of raw electrode recordings from a Neuralink implant.

This Neuralink is implanted in the motor cortex of a non-human primate, and recordings were made while playing a video game, like this.

Compression is essential: N1 implant generates ~200Mbps of eletrode data (1024 electrodes @ 20kHz, 10b resolution) and can transmit ~1Mbps wirelessly. So > 200x compression is needed. Compression must run in real time (< 1ms) at low power (< 10mW, including radio).

Neuralink is looking for new approaches to this compression problem, and exceptional engineers to work on it.

Task

Build executables ./encode and ./decode which pass eval.sh. This verifies compression is lossless and measures compression ratio.

Your submission will be scored on the compression ratio it achieves on a different set of electrode recordings. Bonus points for optimizing latency and power efficiency

Submit with source code and build script. Should at least build on Linux.

Pypi Brainwire Package

Encode and Decode are now available under the brainwire pypi package. The modules will detect neural spikes, compress the data, and decompress the data to present a sample rate and array of amplitudes that only contain detected spike information. They can be downloaded using pip install brainwire and implemented with brainwire.encode.compress(file_path) or brainwire.decode.decompress(compressed_brainwire_data_format) where 'compressed_brainwire_data_format' is the compressed data returned from 'brainwire.encode.compress()' and the 'file_path' is the path to raw neural data in '.wav' format.

Sample Compression Results:

Encoding Time:

• Time Δ Microseconds: 3686937.0 μs
• Time Δ Milliseconds: 3686.937 ms
• Time Δ Seconds: 3.686937 s

Decoding Time:

• Time Δ Microseconds: 3871124.0 μs
• Time Δ Milliseconds: 3871.124 ms
• Time Δ Seconds: 3.871124 s

Total Time (encode and decode):

• Time Δ Microseconds: 7558100.0 μs
• Time Δ Milliseconds: 7558.1 ms
• Time Δ Seconds: 7.5581 s

Compression Ratio

• Original File Size: 197526
• Compressed File Size: 92251
• Percent of Compression: 53.30%