On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 08:13:52AM -0600, The Fool wrote: > Hrm. If you include all the shorter pathways it's > > the sum of N! + (N-1)!...2! > > 3! + 2! = 8
None of which is relevant to the question of processing power of the brain. If you approximate the brain as a bunch of synapses (5E14, say) connected between a bunch of neurons (1E11), then each synapse needs about 3 bytes of storage space to store the address of two neurons (with 1 bit to indicate whether the synapse is on or off). That comes to 1.5E15 bytes. So, if you do 3 operations per neuron as you go through one update cycle of your state machine, then you need about 1E15 ops per second, so IBM's machine falls a little short, but it is close, probably withint the range of error of this approximation. Accessing the data structure as memory elements would slow this down a lot, though, but I bet some clever computer scientist could come up with a near-optimal clustering of the neurons so that a lot of the data could stay in the registers. -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
