Re: "true" AI Hardware Development

"JGCASEY" <jgkjcasey@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Curt Welch wrote:

... the brain in fact is not all that amazing. It's not
much more amazing than our computers. The internet is a
machine many times more complex than any human brain.
We have already build signal processing machine far more
complex than anything nature built.

What measure of complexity did you use to compare the brain
and other things that "nature built" with the internet and
current signal processing machines?

I can't think of a measure that doesn't make the internet many orders of
magnitude more complex than a human brain.

A human brain has 100 billion neurons and maybe 10^15 synapses? How many
transistors make up the internet? A Pentium 4 CPU alone as over 40 million
transistors and ram has one transistors per bit of memory, so a system with
only 512 MB of memory has another 4 billion transistors in it just for the
memory.

One quote I found on the internet says: "By 2001, 268 million computers
will be connected to the Internet". And I believe that was a reference to
end-user machines in 2001 and not servers. I believe the number of servers
connected to the internet is around 400 million now. But lets just use the
200 million number.

So that's 2e8 computers times maybe 4e9 transistors per computer giving you
8e17 transistors vs a brain with 1e11 neurons. That's 100,000 transistors
per each neuron. And that doesn't count the fact that transistors switch
about 1,000 times faster than neurons.

And that's using very low-ball numbers for the number of devices connected
to the internet today - easily off by a factor of thousands.

If you look at data flow you find a human brain is receiving two video
signals and two audio signals and a ton of touch and other data. And in
turn, is producing output which is many orders of magnitude less than what
it is receiving. I've not seen any numbers on what the actual bandwidth of
this information flow is, but I suspect it's less than 100 Mbits. A single
PC can beat this easily. The data flow on the internet is so much larger
than this there's no comparison. Usenet alone has a data flow of around
250 Mbits these days which means every Usenet server on the planet is
pushing more bandwidth than a human.

Other people estimate the processing power of a brain at around 100
teraflops but the worlds fastest supercomputer (Blue Gene) has hit over 300
teraflops now. They will be over 1000 Teraflops in a year or two. So that
single computer (which is probably connected to the internet) rates as
faster and more complex than a single human brain.

I can't think of a metric to measure the complexity of a signal processing
device that doesn't put the internet as a whole many orders of magnitude
ahead of the human brain.

The amount of complex behavior produced by the entire internet in a few
seconds is far greater than a human produces in a life time. No matter how
you choose to measure complexity of a single processing device, the
internet will always win by many orders of magnitude compared to a single
human brain. Humans are just slow stupid machines compared to our
computers. Compared to the internet as a whole, a human brain doesn't even
come close.

The brain remains special not because of it's raw power, but simply because
of what it can do. Before long, we will figure out how to build machines
that do the same thing, and when that happens, the brain will look just as
small and weak as a human arm looks small and weak compared to a robotic
manufacturing arm.

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

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