Brain beats all computers

[Nottingham]

Brain beats all computers
By Roger Dobson
14 September 2003


Forecasters who predicted that computers are poised to become more powerful than the human brain have got it hopelessly wrong.

For the first time, researchers have calculated that the power of a single brain in terms of memory capacity and discovered that it is greater than all the computers ever made.

While even the biggest computer has a capacity of around 10,000,000,000,000 bytes (10 to the power of 12), the human brain has a colossal 10 followed by 8,432 noughts, say the scientists who made the calculations in the journal Brain and Mind.

more....

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_medical/story.jsp?story=443276

But heres the ? I bet Computers Beat a Chimp Brain! :bounce:

[alexwcovington]

1. Hehe and then when the computers catch up

They'll revise it again. My physics teacher had old estimates pegging the memory capacity of humans at a scant 200 MB.

[Nottingham]

2. See don't underestimate the Power of Man's Mind!

:bounce:

[Dirk39]

3. My attitude towards this was always...

when our conception of intelligence leads to the conclusion that a machine, created by human beings, is more intelligent than we are, then there's something wrong with this conception - human beings can be stupid, too. Artificial intelligence is just idiotic. Stupid fast mechanic machines, that's all computers are.
Whatever a computer does better or faster should be excluded from the definition of human intelligence. And by the way, people who don't write software have more illusions about these stupid machines than people, who do. In general.
Writing software for many years in Germany,
Dirk

[Nottingham]

5. Hey Dirk! Ya whats really bad is when man thinks they are smarter!

Like when ya call about a bill and you get the answer WELL THE COMPUTER says! When Man starts Stop Thinking and letting Machines think for him well then thats the disaster :bounce:

[Dirk39]

7. Don't reveal our secrets!!!

One truth about evolution is, that the further you go in evolution, the longer is the distance between the brain and the decision-making-department of the creature. Computers are exactly the opposite. Just think about the rules, we have in health-care: it's not allowed to write a software, that makes decisions. Human beings have to do it. You can't write a software for a hospital deciding, that someone has a flu, basing on the temperature and other dates, a human being has typed into the system. And besides, computers are just very very fast, they can't even calculate to well....
Dirk

[Gman]

4. Unless you're like Bush with an 8088 for a brain

running DOS 1.1.

[laconicsax]

10. DOS 1.1?

You give the man too much credit.

Bush strikes me as more of an Apple II with a monochrome monitor running BASIC--No hard drive, so all programs must be saved to a good ole 5.25" floppy.

The press conference program would have a Q/A section following the main speech.

10 INPUT "THANK YOU. ANY QUESTIONS?"; Q$
20 PRINT "9/11 TERRA"
30 PRINT "WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION"
40 PRINT "JUSTICE AND RESOLVE"
50 PRINT "IRAQI REGIME"
60 FOR A=1 TO 4
70 GOTO 10
80 NEXT A
90 PRINT "THANK YOU AND GOD BLESS"
100 STOP

[w4rma]

6. My guess is that we'll need to build biological computers to come close

Mechanical machines are always much less efficient than biological ones.

(Heh, this will make for some interesting ethical issues.)

[cprise]

8. That can't be right!!!

Computers must be smarter than humans. I specifically remember an Intel store display 11 years ago stating the human brain works at 33MHz! So their new processor at the time was just as good as a human brain!

Isn't that a marvelous coincidence?

[Atlant]

16. The human brain cycles at something less than 100 Hz.

The human brain cycles at something less than 100 Hz. What gives
it its enormous apparaent power is that while any given functional
unit in the brain is slow, it's MASSIVELY PARALLEL, allowing
most of its billions of functional units to operate simultaneously.

But it does definitely have an upper bound on complexity, and
this supposed "scientist" has way, way over-estimated it.

Atlant

[CShine]

9. Just wait.

It won't happen today or tomorrow, but it will happen.

[paulkienitz]

11. this is bull-doodoo

These alleged scientists are full of crap. The human brain is equivalent to maybe 10^15 or 10^16 transistors, only much slower. You can't get no 10^8,000 bytes out of that.

[paulkienitz]

12. yay, my damn gold star finally showed up.

[R Hickey]

14. I invented that gold star...

A couple of years back, I suggested that DU give out 'gold stars' to our donors, and by god, DU picked up my suggestion... and for that reason I think my gold star should be bigger than the others, but up until now, I've never complained...

Well actually, I should give some credit to my piano teacher, who came up with the original 'gold star' idea some 48 years ago...

[Cronus Protagonist]

18. Never mind. It's not the size that matters....

It's what you do with it that counts.

I, personally, have never had that said to me, but a friend of mine with an especially small penis says he has no trouble wiedling it like an iron girder...



Click Here To See Fair & Balanced Buttons, Stickers & Magnets!>

[papau]

13. Digital or analog or multi state?

I believe the interconnects and feedbacks and possible multi-states raise the "equivalent digital" number

Slower is true - which is why the overnighter before the test rarely works - the brain needs sleep to store all the newly learned facts.

[Atlant]

17. Ahh, they'll just whisper "unknown methods of quantum computing"...

Ahh, they'll just whisper "unknown methods of quantum computing" or
some such, and hope that their line of BS about qubits dazzles you
into believing their story.

Atlant

[Atlant]

15. Horseshit.

> the human brain has a colossal 10 followed by 8,432 noughts

Horseshit.

Atlant

[Devils Advocate NZ]

19. And your expertise is?

I have done some reading on neural networks as well as some experimenting on my own PC, and from that I can tell you that they just don't work the same way as you would expect.

So tell me, what do you base your claim on?

[arendt]

20. Skepticism is always required for the scientific method

I saw this article, and it gave no details beyond the number.

Since the article repeats the well known number of approximately
100 Billion neurons, they must be gettin the other factor of
10^^8000 from the interconnections. That is, each neuron
could have connections to 8000 other neurons. And, theoretically,
each connection could be a binary bit.

But, there is no evidence that a neuron digitally codes each
and every input. Rather, the dogma is that they simply do an
analog sum. Now, there is some evidence that neural outputs
have some kind of coding. About ten years ago, some guys
showed a Walsh-Hadamard code in the processing of image
columns in V1. But, it went nowhere. I don't know if it was
disproved, but it didn't start any revolutions.

So, until I see some facts, my bullshit meter is somewhere in
the cold fusion neighborhood.

arendt

[paulkienitz]

22. cold fusion solved

By the way, somebody writing in to the letters column of New Scientist finally provided the answer to what was really going on in those cold fusion experiments (and their successors which have quietly continued up to the present day). It turns out that palladium has a tendency to soak up hydrogen or deuterium into its crystal matrix, and then gradually release heat as it soaks back out again, because the metal was elastically stretched by the inclusion of the hydrogen atoms.

And yes, the 10^8000 number is hogwash -- that's what the brain's interconnectivity would be if every neuron could and routinely did interconnect with any other. In real life the number of interconnections available is far more limited.

[Atlant]

21. My expertise is based on...

My expertise is based on over 25 years *DESIGNING* cutting
edge computers and their operating systems, from the days
when we thought 8KB of 960ns core memory was "hot stuff"
to the days when we're talking about 4-way instruction
issue at >1GHz.

Combined with reasonably extensive reading about how our
personal wetware works (or is currently believed to work).

Sorry, Devil, but you're not talking to someone who's
naive about these things, and teh claim in the .0 post
is just totally loony.

Atlant