RE: [agi] Discovering the Capacity of Human Memory
The total number of particles in the whole universe is usually estimated to be around 10^80. These guys claim that the storage of the brain is 10^8432 bits. That means that my brain has around 10^8352 bits of storage for every particle in the whole universe. I thought I was feeling smarter than usual this morning! Possible explanations: 1) The quote to totally wrong the the ^ should be a , ? 2) They got confused and thought it was 1 April 3) They are actually doing research into just how flaky AI researchers really are and how easy it is to publish mathematical nonsense in Mind and Brain Journal 4) The scientists somehow managed to get their PhDs without understanding how numbers work 5) They concluded that the brain is really analogue and so they worked out the volume of the skull at the Planck scale (actually that doesn't work either as the Planck length is far far far to large at 1.6 x 10^-35 m) and so on... Does anybody have a better explanation? Shane --- Amara D. Angelica [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/news_printable.html?id=2417 Discovering the Capacity of Human Memory Brain and Mind, August 2003 The memory capacity of the human brain is on the order of 10^8432 bits, three scientists have estimated. Writing in the August issue of Brain and Mind, their OAR cognitive model asserts that human memory and knowledge are represented by a network of relations, i.e., connections of synapses between neurons, rather than by the neurons themselves as in the traditional information-container model (1 neuron = 1 bit). This explains why the magnitude of neurons in an adult brain seems stable; however, huge amount of information can be remembered throughout the entire life of a person, they point out. Based on the projected computer memory capacity of 8 x 10^12 bits in the next ten years, Yingxu Wang et al. conclude that the memory capacity of a human brain is equivalent to at least 10^8419 modern computersThis tremendous difference of memory magnitudes between human beings and computers demonstrates the efficiency of information representation, storage, and processing in the human brains. They also conclude that this new factor has revealed the tremendous quantitative gap between the natural and machine intelligence and that next-generation computer memory systems may be built according to their relational model rather than the traditional container metaphor because the former is more powerful, flexible, and efficient, and is capable of generating a mathematically unlimited memory capacity by using limited number of neurons in the brain or hardware cells in the next generation computers. Brain and Mind 4 (2): 189-198, August 2003 --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED] Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://mail.messenger.yahoo.co.uk --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: [agi] Discovering the Capacity of Human Memory
Good point Shane, I didn't even pay attention to the ludicrous size of the number, so keen was I to get my rant out. --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [agi] Discovering the Capacity of Human Memory
The paper can be accessed at http://www.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/wangyx/Publications/Papers/BM-Vol4.2-HMC.pdf Their conclusion is based on the assumptions that there are 10^11 neurons and their average synapses number is 10^3. Therefore the total potential relational combinations is (10^11)! / (10^3)! ((10^11)! - (10^3)!), which is approximately 10^8432. The model is obviously an oversimplification, and the number is way too big. Pei - Original Message - From: shane legg [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2003 6:24 AM Subject: RE: [agi] Discovering the Capacity of Human Memory The total number of particles in the whole universe is usually estimated to be around 10^80. These guys claim that the storage of the brain is 10^8432 bits. That means that my brain has around 10^8352 bits of storage for every particle in the whole universe. I thought I was feeling smarter than usual this morning! Possible explanations: 1) The quote to totally wrong the the ^ should be a , ? 2) They got confused and thought it was 1 April 3) They are actually doing research into just how flaky AI researchers really are and how easy it is to publish mathematical nonsense in Mind and Brain Journal 4) The scientists somehow managed to get their PhDs without understanding how numbers work 5) They concluded that the brain is really analogue and so they worked out the volume of the skull at the Planck scale (actually that doesn't work either as the Planck length is far far far to large at 1.6 x 10^-35 m) and so on... Does anybody have a better explanation? Shane --- Amara D. Angelica [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/news_printable.html?id=2417 Discovering the Capacity of Human Memory Brain and Mind, August 2003 The memory capacity of the human brain is on the order of 10^8432 bits, three scientists have estimated. Writing in the August issue of Brain and Mind, their OAR cognitive model asserts that human memory and knowledge are represented by a network of relations, i.e., connections of synapses between neurons, rather than by the neurons themselves as in the traditional information-container model (1 neuron = 1 bit). This explains why the magnitude of neurons in an adult brain seems stable; however, huge amount of information can be remembered throughout the entire life of a person, they point out. Based on the projected computer memory capacity of 8 x 10^12 bits in the next ten years, Yingxu Wang et al. conclude that the memory capacity of a human brain is equivalent to at least 10^8419 modern computersThis tremendous difference of memory magnitudes between human beings and computers demonstrates the efficiency of information representation, storage, and processing in the human brains. They also conclude that this new factor has revealed the tremendous quantitative gap between the natural and machine intelligence and that next-generation computer memory systems may be built according to their relational model rather than the traditional container metaphor because the former is more powerful, flexible, and efficient, and is capable of generating a mathematically unlimited memory capacity by using limited number of neurons in the brain or hardware cells in the next generation computers. Brain and Mind 4 (2): 189-198, August 2003 --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED] Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://mail.messenger.yahoo.co.uk --- 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]
RE: [agi] Discovering the Capacity of Human Memory
1) The quote to totally wrong the the ^ should be a , ? It's 10 to the 8432 power, according to the paper. This is the theoretical memory capacity, not its actual size, but no estimates are given for real-world typical size of memory, so the comparison with machine capacity seems unrealistic. The number is derived as follows: Assuming there are n neurons in the brain, and on average there are m connections between a given neuron and the rest of them, the magnitude of the brain memory capacity can be expressed by the following mathematical model, the human memory capacity model, as given below: n!/[m!(n-m)!] where n is the total number of neurons and m the number of average partial connections between neurons. However, this is extremely hard to calculate and is almost intractable using a modern computer, because of the exponential complicity or the recursive computational costs for such large n and m, so they did some math tricks to estimate it. One issue I didn't see addressed in the paper is the constraint on neurons actually being physically able to connect with distant ones. In a real world computation, shouldn't the upper bound be dramatically lower? By the way, not that it has any bearing on reality, but it's actually 10^90 bits that could be stored by the amount of matter that we have in the universe right now, according to Seth Lloyd (http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0530.html?m %3D3), so at max capacity, each brain would require on the order of 10^8342 parallel universes to be converted to computronium. That's one heck of a supercomputer. :) --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [agi] Discovering the Capacity of Human Memory
Thanks for the link Pei. The thing is that they are talking about the number of BITS not the number of POSSIBLE STATES. Given x bits the number of possible states is 2^x. For example with 32 bits you can have 2^32 different states... or about 4,000,000,000 possible states. Thus, if the brain has 10^8432 bits of storage as they claim, then the number of possible states is 2^(10^8432). To make things even worse, even if they realise their error and decided that they didn't understand what a bit is and that they actually meant possible states, the number of bits in this case then becomes just log_2 (10^8432) = 8432 * log_2 (10) = 28,010 bits or about 3.5 kilo bytes of storage. I'd like to think that I have more than a 3.5 Kb brain!! They really should have sanity checked their results. Shane --- Pei Wang [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The paper can be accessed at http://www.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/wangyx/Publications/Papers/BM-Vol4.2-HMC.pdf Their conclusion is based on the assumptions that there are 10^11 neurons and their average synapses number is 10^3. Therefore the total potential relational combinations is (10^11)! / (10^3)! ((10^11)! - (10^3)!), which is approximately 10^8432. The model is obviously an oversimplification, and the number is way too big. Pei - Original Message - From: shane legg [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2003 6:24 AM Subject: RE: [agi] Discovering the Capacity of Human Memory The total number of particles in the whole universe is usually estimated to be around 10^80. These guys claim that the storage of the brain is 10^8432 bits. That means that my brain has around 10^8352 bits of storage for every particle in the whole universe. I thought I was feeling smarter than usual this morning! Possible explanations: 1) The quote to totally wrong the the ^ should be a , ? 2) They got confused and thought it was 1 April 3) They are actually doing research into just how flaky AI researchers really are and how easy it is to publish mathematical nonsense in Mind and Brain Journal 4) The scientists somehow managed to get their PhDs without understanding how numbers work 5) They concluded that the brain is really analogue and so they worked out the volume of the skull at the Planck scale (actually that doesn't work either as the Planck length is far far far to large at 1.6 x 10^-35 m) and so on... Does anybody have a better explanation? Shane --- Amara D. Angelica [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/news_printable.html?id=2417 Discovering the Capacity of Human Memory Brain and Mind, August 2003 The memory capacity of the human brain is on the order of 10^8432 bits, three scientists have estimated. Writing in the August issue of Brain and Mind, their OAR cognitive model asserts that human memory and knowledge are represented by a network of relations, i.e., connections of synapses between neurons, rather than by the neurons themselves as in the traditional information-container model (1 neuron = 1 bit). This explains why the magnitude of neurons in an adult brain seems stable; however, huge amount of information can be remembered throughout the entire life of a person, they point out. Based on the projected computer memory capacity of 8 x 10^12 bits in the next ten years, Yingxu Wang et al. conclude that the memory capacity of a human brain is equivalent to at least 10^8419 modern computersThis tremendous difference of memory magnitudes between human beings and computers demonstrates the efficiency of information representation, storage, and processing in the human brains. They also conclude that this new factor has revealed the tremendous quantitative gap between the natural and machine intelligence and that next-generation computer memory systems may be built according to their relational model rather than the traditional container metaphor because the former is more powerful, flexible, and efficient, and is capable of generating a mathematically unlimited memory capacity by using limited number of neurons in the brain or hardware cells in the next generation computers. Brain and Mind 4 (2): 189-198, August 2003 --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED] Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://mail.messenger.yahoo.co.uk --- 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
RE: [agi] Discovering the Capacity of Human Memory
It's also disconcerting that something like this can make it through the review process. Transdisciplinary is oftentimes a pseudonym for combining half-baked and ill-formed ideas from multiple domains into an incoherent mess. This paper is an excellent example. (bad math + bad neuroscience != good paper) --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [agi] Discovering the Capacity of Human Memory
On Mon, 15 Sep 2003, Amara D. Angelica wrote: Any commments on this paper? http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/1389-1987/current Anders Sandberg's PhD thesis (thanks to Cole Kitchen for originally posting this to the AGI list) at: http://akira.nada.kth.se/~asa/Thesis/thesis.pdf entitled Bayesian Attractor Neural Network Models of Memory, provides a more reasonable basis for estimating human memory capacity. In Section 8.1 he roughly estimates the capacity of the cortex at 10^10 patterns. Bill --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: [agi] Discovering the Capacity of Human Memory
Yeah, it's a bit of a worry. By the way, if anybody is trying to look it up, I spelt the guy's name wrong, it's actually Stirling's equation. You can find it in an online book here: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itprnn/book.html It's a great book, about 640 pages long. The result I used is equation 1.13 which is on page 2. Shane --- Brad Wyble [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It's also disconcerting that something like this can make it through the review process. Transdisciplinary is oftentimes a pseudonym for combining half-baked and ill-formed ideas from multiple domains into an incoherent mess. This paper is an excellent example. (bad math + bad neuroscience != good paper) --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED] Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://mail.messenger.yahoo.co.uk --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: [agi] Discovering the Capacity of Human Memory
Their conclusion is based on the assumptions that there are 10^11 neurons and their average synapses number is 10^3. Therefore the total potential relational combinations is (10^11)! / (10^3)! ((10^11)! - (10^3)!), which is approximately 10^8432. The model is obviously an oversimplification, and the number is way too big. I was wondering about that. It seems that the number represents the size of the phase space, when a more useful metric would be the size (Kolmogorov complexity) of the average point *in* the phase space. There is a world of difference between the number of patterns that can be encoded and the size of the biggest pattern that can be encoded; the former isn't terribly important, but the latter is very important. Cheers, -James Rogers [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [agi] Discovering the Capacity of Human Memory
James Rogers wrote: I was wondering about that. It seems that the number represents the size of the phase space, when a more useful metric would be the size (Kolmogorov complexity) of the average point *in* the phase space. There is a world of difference between the number of patterns that can be encoded and the size of the biggest pattern that can be encoded; the former isn't terribly important, but the latter is very important. Are you talking about the average point in the phase space in the sense of an average empirical human brain, or in the sense of a randomly selected point in the phase space? I assume you mean the former, since, for the latter question, if you have a simple program P that produces a phase space of size 2^X, the average size of a random point in the phase space must be roughly X (plus the size of P?) according to both Shannon and Kolmogorov. (Incidentally, I'll join in expressing my astonishment and dismay at the level of sheer mathematical and physical and computational ignorance on the part of authors and reviewers that must have been necessary for even the abstract of this paper to make it past the peer review process, and add that the result violates the Susskind holographic bound for an object that can be contained in a 1-meter sphere - no more than 10^70 bits of information.) -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: [agi] Discovering the Capacity of Human Memory
Eliezer wrote: Are you talking about the average point in the phase space in the sense of an average empirical human brain, or in the sense of a randomly selected point in the phase space? I assume you mean the former, since, for the latter question, if you have a simple program P that produces a phase space of size 2^X, the average size of a random point in the phase space must be roughly X (plus the size of P?) according to both Shannon and Kolmogorov. Arrgh... What you said. My post was sloppy, and I stated it really badly. I'm literally doing about 5-way multitasking today, all important things that demand my attention. It seems that my email time-slice is under-performing under the circumstances. Cheers, -James Rogers [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [agi] Discovering the Capacity of Human Memory
The Tao is the set of truths that can be stored in zero bits. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
