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RTyp06
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did you know....?
« on: September 26, 2007, 02:28:51 am »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIqk4agzKPE

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Resh Aleph
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Re: did you know....?
« Reply #1 on: September 26, 2007, 08:24:37 am »

Interesting, but some of those statements seem to be of questionable accuracy.

I remember reading somewhere that computers have long exceeded brain computation capability. This makes to me. What makes us more intelligent isn't raw computation power, but the fact we are designed to constantly learn and adapt ourselves in every aspect of life. Our advantage is in software, not hardware (though I suspect it would be more natural to do AI by radically changing hardware rather than software).
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RTyp06
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Re: did you know....?
« Reply #2 on: September 27, 2007, 01:27:51 am »

"...computers have long exceeded brain computation capability."

Whaaa? You've got it way wrong bro. I'd like to know the source of this info because they couldn't be more wrong. Today's computers can't come close to the real-time processing power of the human brain. If you find this article will you share it please?

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/brain/
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Resh Aleph
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Re: did you know....?
« Reply #3 on: September 27, 2007, 10:20:00 am »

Sorry, I really don't remember where I read it - it was a long time ago. It said modern processors have way more transistors than the brain has neurons (or something similar). But I don't remember how credible the source was. Undecided

I think it's an unfair comparison, anyway. It depends on the definition of computation power: computers win big time in basic operations, but humans win big time in advanced operations - finding associations, learning, reasoning.

Again, in my opinion computers are bad at those things simply because they just don't do them, not because they're slow. They don't know how. The hardware is designed to do arithmetic operations and follow instructions rather than think.

Of course, this is just a philosophical notion and I could be terribly wrong. Tongue
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Re: did you know....?
« Reply #4 on: September 27, 2007, 08:37:28 pm »

It's hard to compare computers to brains. But basically, the brain runs at a slower frequency than a computer. This much is true. Your neurons and so forth aren't firing at 3 GHz or anywhere close. The brain makes up for this with massive parallelism. Only in the past few years have we seen computers go to multiple parallel hardware threads... 2, 4, 6 threads. The brain, on the other hand, basically has a much larger number of things it can do simultaneously. It isn't, for example, issuing the command to breath, then the heart beat command, then the "take a picture with the eye" command, etc... it's all happening at once.

So what "computes" more is an odd question. Hands down, a computer is going to add numbers together faster. It can read data faster. But what software struggles with are things like analogies, intuitive leaps, and so forth. These are basically what we humans consider signs of intelligence... hence we tend to call our brains more powerful. But it really depends on what context you put the comparison in.

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Elvish Pillager
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Re: did you know....?
« Reply #5 on: September 27, 2007, 11:19:15 pm »

So what "computes" more is an odd question.
I bet information theory has a lot to say about this. On the other hand, I don't know much about information theory.
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Death 999
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Re: did you know....?
« Reply #6 on: September 28, 2007, 09:19:20 pm »

Information theory actually doesn't have so much to say about it until you can tell it what to consider the information in question.


As for the movie, I'd really like to see some cites on the stuff comprising most of minute 4.
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