Try calculating instead the incoming bits/second stored...now calculate the required storage space. When you do that the computer starts looking much less competitive...today. Calculate the space required to store, without definitions or attached meanings, all the words in the English language. Now try to figure out how much more space you need...
I am even more impressed by the storage processes of the brain than I am my the pattern processing...though the two are probably closely related. (Also, it's not clear that s synapse can be realistically modeled by a pair of transistors...but even if it could there's the matter of architecture, which has a strong effect on computational efficiency.) All that said, I do tend to think that traditional estimates of the computational capacity of the brain are two high ... but this probably isn't the year of the $100 or $1000 human brain equivalent CPU. Try 5 years from now...or more. I'd be surprised if it were more than 20. (I cautiously revised that final figure upwards.) Software, however, is where things are probably lagging. (Or perhaps not...who knows what is happening behind closed doors.) Eric Baum wrote: > 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] > > ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
