>>=================FROM ED'S ORIGINAL POST=====> it is precisely because the human brains can do such massive searches (averaging roughly 3 to 300 trillion/second in the cortex alone) that lets us so often come up with the appropriate memory or reason at the appropriate time.
>========== MIKE'S RESPONSE=====> Do you think the brain works by massive search in dealing with problems? Chess - a top master may consider consciously v. roughly 150 moves in a minute. Do you think his unconscious brain is considering a lot more? How many, roughly in what time? ===ED PORTER =====> Big Blue showed the power of massive search in Chess. In the human brain, we are not capable of massive exact searches, particularly ones involving complex rapid accurate sequential processing, but we are capable of massive less accurate parallel search. If a human considers 150 moves a minute, that is a period with roughly 2000 gama waves, during each of which there can be a massive separately encoded spreading activation. And many forms of spreading activation may be independent, to various decrease, from such gama waves. I think the consideration of each move probably involve massive searches in memory for patterns related to that move in the current context, and multiple massive searches involving multiple levels of implication from such patterns. If you think about how implication spread, you realize that is easy to have millions or billions of potential activation in just 3 or 4 inferencing steps, without some sort of filtering process. You also have to realize that your consciousness is only aware of that small portion of the activations in your brain which win competitive process for the attention necessary to make your consciousness aware of them. >========== MIKE'S RESPONSE=====> "Name 10 famous Frenchmen". How many Frenchmen roughly do you think your brain is checking out and how fast as you deal with that? ===ED PORTER =====> This task might not require as broad a search as some, because it only requires a relatively few indices and the number of object indexed by some of those indices is rather small, but I would still assume it involves millions of activations. I think the brain's indexing is often much less simple and clear than that used in most simple databases programs. You may well not have a clearly defined index (is a French person), and even if you do, many people whom you know of who are French may not be clearly labeled under it. Instead you probably have experiences of people in many different contexts which might indicate they are French. Also I think our brains often can most quickly recover things that are indexed by multiple indices. If you recently spent a year working in France for a French company with many French co-workers, you would probably be able to rattle off names of Frenchmen much more quickly because you could just think of all the people you have spent hundreds of hours with within the offices of your French employer, and there you would have many indices coding for the desired quality, making the appropriate answer pop out above the noise much more boldly. >========== MIKE'S RESPONSE=====> Do you dispute Hawkins' "one hundred step rule"? He argues that the brain can recognize a face in 1/2 sec. - which can involve information traversing a chain of at most 100 neurons in that time. And "the largest conceivable parallel computer can't do anything useful in one hundred steps, no matter how large or how fast." [See "On Intelligence" pp 66-7] This rule would presumably severely limit the number of associations that can be made with any idea in a given time, or no? ===ED PORTER =====> The Poggio/Serre work that I have cited so many times before (including my post that started this thread) provides a working computer model for the very type of fast feed-forward object recognition that is done very rapidly by the brain. I think it was modeling the type of recognition the brain can do in about 150ms, which lets you think you saw an alligator, a lion, a dog, a fish, etc. In that system a 160x160 pixel input patch required 23 million models, each with many inputs and outputs. If I remember correctly the lower level models had 16x16 pixel receptive fields, which is 256 inputs for each such model, so presumably many tens of millions of node to node communications would be involved in the spreading activation involved in each such recognition rapid recognition. And the 160x160 grayscale input space is much smaller than the input space of the human visual field which is probably a roughly 300x300 foviated field with red, green, blue, grayscale, and stereo vision --- a whole separate set of models for motion perception --- and an ability to recognize many more than the, I think, roughly 1000K objects the Poggio/Serre system could recognize. To top this all off, if a person is scanning a changing scene, this processes of many million of activation could be repeating itself many times a second. So I am not at all disputing Hawkins. The type of visual recognition he is talking about could easily involve 100 million to a billion messages a second, and it is not necessariliy one of the most complex types of searches that would be involved in human thinking. -----Original Message----- From: Mike Tintner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2008 1:22 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: FW: [agi] WHAT PORTION OF CORTICAL PROCESSES ARE BOUND BY "THE BINDING PROBLEM"? Ed:it is precisely because the human brains can do such massive searches (averaging roughly 3 to 300 trillion/second in the cortex alone) that lets us so often come up with the appropriate memory or reason at the appropriate time. Do you think the brain works by massive search in dealing with problems? Chess - a top master may consider consciously v. roughly 150 moves in a minute. Do you think his unconscious brain is considering a lot more? How many, roughly in what time? "Name 10 famous Frenchmen". How many Frenchmen roughly do you think your brain is checking out and how fast as you deal with that? Do you dispute Hawkins' "one hundred step rule"? He argues that the brain can recognize a face in 1/2 sec. - which can involve information traversing a chain of at most 100 neurons in that time. And "the largest conceivable parallel computer can't do anything useful in one hundred steps, no matter how large or how fast." [See "On Intelligence" pp 66-7] This rule would presumably severely limit the number of associations that can be made with any idea in a given time, or no? _____ agi | <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/> | <https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; f> Modify Your Subscription <http://www.listbox.com> ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=106510220-47b225 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
