On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 6:34 AM, Tim Tyler via AGI <[email protected]> wrote: > On 27/10/2014 21:22, Matt Mahoney via AGI wrote: > >> My estimate is based on the information content of the human genome. >> The interesting thing about this is that the human genome is not much >> bigger than that of an insect. Thus, the major distinction between >> "insect level intelligence" and "human level intelligence" is >> computing power. > > That's assuming that all the relevant programming is stored in > DNA genes. However our cultural programming should count for > something.
It counts for half. The human genome and human long term memory each have an information content on the order of 10^9 bits. > There are simple general learning algorithms. No there aren't. Suppose you have a bit prediction algorithm whose source code is n bits long. Then I can create a bit sequence with approximately the same Kolmogorov complexity that your algorithm can't predict. My program runs your program and outputs the opposite of whatever it predicts. > Machine evolution is already going thousands of times faster than DNA > evolution managed (according to Moravec). If machine intelligence today > is somewhere around the insect stage, it seems plausible that once it > can better contribute to its own development, we might see a broadly > similar hike in the rate of progress. Not really. Machines are doubling in computing capacity every 1.5 years. However, a bacteria colony doubles its molecular computing capacity every 20 minutes. The apparent rapid progress in machine evolution is due to the transfer of human knowledge to machines (design, coding, training). Once that is complete (insects are not far below humans), the speed of evolution will revert to its natural limit of one bit of Kolmogorov complexity per generation (population doubling and fitness selection). Evolution has developed a number of innovations to speed up evolution since the first self-replicating single stranded RNA molecules 3.5 billion years ago. The most important of these are: - Protein synthesis. - RNA transcription from DNA. - Sexual reproduction and gene swapping. - Photosynthesis and oxygen metabolism. - DNA error correction (10^-9 error rate). - Gene regulation leading to multicellular organisms. - Development of language and culture. Currently, plants convert 1% of the sun's 10^17 W of power to food, powering 10^33 molecular operations per second on 10^37 DNA bases and 10^39 amino acid molecules at close to the thermodynamic limit of 10^-20 J per operation. The evolution of humans required 10^50 operations over 10^17 seconds using 10^32 J of energy. Other than collecting solar power from space, physics only allows us to develop marginally more efficient technologies. For example, solar panels are already more efficient than chlorophyll. At most, we can build a Dyson sphere to capture all of the sun's 3.8 x 10^26 W. We can increase its radius to several thousand AU where it would be cooled to near CMB equilibrium (3 K) to lower the thermodynamic limit to about 10^-22 J per bit operation. This would allow 10^48 operations per second, reducing the simulation time of human evolution to a few minutes (plus several months to communicate the result across the sphere at the speed of light). Anything beyond this will require either interstellar travel, speeding up the rate at which the sun burns hydrogen, or direct matter to energy conversion using a black hole. -- -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
