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When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

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Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#171

Post by Balgair »

janpmz wrote: post #151
RaftPeople wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 86 billion neurons in a brain [1]* > * 400 transistors to simulate a synapse [2]* > * That's 34 trillion, 400 billion transistors to simulate a human brain.* You forgot about: 1-Astrocytes - more common than neurons, computational, have their own style of internal and external signaling, have bi-directional communication with neurons at the synapse (and are thought to control the neurons) 2-Synapse: a single syna…

Reading about brain waves makes me think analog computing could be the way to go.

The main issue is that we're lacking one of the four fundamental circuit components: the memristor [0].

If we had a simple, throw it in a box for five years, stable memristor, we'd have everything we'd need for brain modeling. Being as a memristor is effectively a synapse.

With that, we would want to do everything in the analog domain anyways.

[0] the other three are the resistor, the capacitor, and the inductor.

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#172

Post by psunavy03 »

syndicatedjelly wrote: post #19
psunavy03 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We'd need something entirely different from laser lithography for that to happen. Like, you know . . . nerve cells.

Care to explain?

I was being facetious in that brains already exist.

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#173

Post by rerdavies »

andoando wrote: post #146
rerdavies wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turing's original paper [1] seems to have no such anthropocentric bias. His description is completely mechanical. Out of curiosity, rather than disputativeness, do you remember where you saw that sort of description? Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence paper seems to meticulously exclude that sort of language as well. You have read me backwards. I am firmly of the opinion that the last few decades of resear…

There is a ton. What I said isn't much of my own interpretation, its Turing own description of the machine. The first section of the paper literally says "We may compare a man in the process of computing a real number to machine which is only capable of a finite number of conditions", gives a human analogue for every step/component of the process, continuously refers to the machine as a "he/him", and continuously giv…

Above and beyond the call of duty. Point thoroughly made. Thank you.

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#174

Post by rerdavies »

karma_pharmer wrote: post #164
rerdavies wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blackwell GPU has 208 billion MOSFETs[3] Things us hard sci fi fans will insist on: - You have significantly undercounted transistors. As of 2024 you can put up to 8.4 terabytes of LPDDR5X memory into an NVidia Grace Blackwell rack. So that's 72 trillion transistors (and another 72 trillion capacitors) right there. - A GPU executes significantly faster than a neuron. - The hardware of one GPU can be used to simulat…

Antarctica, perhaps Powered by what? Solar panels in a place where the sun doesn't even rise for months at a time? That big beefy transmission grid that the Antarctic continent is so famous for? The jillions of oil wells already drilled into the Antarctic? Oh wait, I know: penguin guano . Pass the crack pipe, you've had enough my friend.

Nuclear reactors, of course.

Antarctica was chosen because the area on the mainland between 90 degrees west and 150 degrees west is the only major piece of land on Earth not claimed by any country[1], which makes it a good place place to locate businesses that do not wish to be subject to regulations on Artificial Intelligences. Plus it's much more inconvenient to attack than it would be if you located it in a volcanic island.

[1] Sez wiki.

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#175

Post by RecycledEle »

Nobody has a clue how many operations per second the human brain performs, so the usual comparisons are make up garbage.

An intelligent question is: how does one machine compare to the human brain on one dimension of performance?

A slide rule easily outperforms the human brain on some mathematical computations.

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#176

Post by butlike »

hax0ron3 wrote: post #52
geysersam wrote: post #33

The estimate for how many operations per second the brain does is quite a wild guess. It starts out very reasonable, estimating the amount of information the eyes feed to the brain. But from there on it's really just a wild guess. We don't know how the brain processes visual input, we don't know what the fundamental unit of processing in the brain is, or if there is one.

It also blows my mind that that, even though DNA seems to just code for proteins and does not store a schematic for a brain in any way that we've been able to decipher so far, human eggs pretty reliably end up growing into people who 9 months after conception already have a bunch of stuff, including visual processing, working. Of course the DNA is not the only input, there is also the mother's body, the whole process…

I'm thinking out loud here, but what if it's akin to a copy mechanism, or compression expander algorithm like unzipping a file?

The Sperm carries the requisite DNA to activate the egg, which then just executes the body's Replicate() method. The sperm being required is so people don't spontaneously get pregnant.

The DNA coding for proteins is just to build the replicate() method, which then starts copying attributes from the host's (read: mother's) body. Much like how there are differences in compression/expansion algorithms (zip, tar, gz, etc..), the sperm that initiates the replication/unpacking adds non-neutral variance, hence the genetic traits of both parents present in the child.

Put a different way, why reinvent the wheel if I could just grab the memoized visual processing from the parent? Then, if a trait isn't present on the host, say, mid-digital hair, I (as the replication algorithm), "wouldn't know what I wouldn't know" which could perhaps be seeing as synonymous with "evolution."

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#177

Post by jiggawatts »

Balgair wrote: post #171
janpmz wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading about brain waves makes me think analog computing could be the way to go.

The main issue is that we're lacking one of the four fundamental circuit components: the memristor [0]. If we had a simple, throw it in a box for five years, stable memristor, we'd have everything we'd need for brain modeling. Being as a memristor is effectively a synapse. With that, we would want to do everything in the analog domain anyways. [0] the other three are the resistor, the capacitor, and the inductor.

We have them now, on chips and everything.

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#178

Post by butlike »

8bitsrule wrote: post #155
nullc wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

newborns barely know how to see, they have to learn it. https://lozierinstitute.org/dive-deeper/the-newborn-senses-s...

Along with the native language they're surrounded with ... and have to progressively decode all the intricacies thereof.

But the language processor is in place (and arguably robust enough to map any arbitrary language in the world)

Re: When will computer hardware match the human brain? (1998)

#180

Post by sdwr »

cornholio wrote: post #156
geysersam wrote: post #33

The estimate for how many operations per second the brain does is quite a wild guess. It starts out very reasonable, estimating the amount of information the eyes feed to the brain. But from there on it's really just a wild guess. We don't know how the brain processes visual input, we don't know what the fundamental unit of processing in the brain is, or if there is one.

I'm going to go against the grain here and hypothesize that the computational requirements for emulating human reason are much lower than commonly claimed, and probably within the reach of a high end GPU released in the last/next 10 years. If you look at state of the art pre-trained transformers, they gobble up unfathomable quantities of dense textual data that far exceed what even the most learned and smart humans c…

One GPU running continuously is arguable, the 10s of thousands that go into training LLM have definitely way over shot human processing flops.

Evolution definitely still has us beat on optimization-work put into thinking.

Some implemented hacks:

- emotions as shortcuts for reasoning

- learning through imitation

- self-regulation through relation

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