Warren Smith recently pointed out that if you regard a CMOS transistor pair as roughly comparable to a synapse, and assume rather generously that synapses can continuously operate at 400 Hz, a 3.6 GHz Xeon with 286E6 transistors has processing power .5 X 3.6 X 286 X E(9+6)=5.1 E17 whereas a human brain with between 1E12 and 1E15 synapses has "clearly inferior raw power" 4E14 - 4E17 bit-ops/second. "Plus the Xeon bit-ops are better understood and probably more reliable than the human bit-ops. These bit-op/sec estimates are of course merely upper bounds on what is achievable in practice", because your brain would fry if all synapses fired at 400hz simultaneously, and likewise the Xeon.
If somebody out there has some strong reason why the above is misguided, I'd be interested in hearing it. On a related subject, I argued in What is Thought? that the hard problem was not processor speed for running the AI, but coding the software, and estimated that evolution had gone through very roughly 10^35 viruses since the dawn of time, as very rough estimate of raw power available to it for software discovery. Dan Fischer did a similar physicist's estimate, coming up with 10^35 bacteria. However, Warren has recently done some digging on the subject, and come up with what seems to be a better estimate that 10^44 bacteria have lived on Earth. ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
