Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient? Massive Parallelism
1–10 of 55 posts
Re: Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient? Massive Parallelism
#2Like a quantum computer, computing thousand calculations at once and the true answer is what remains? I guess there's a ... parallel there. And I know some people don't like this diductic reduction, analogy, metaphor, callitwhatyouwant. I'd welcome corrections.
Re: Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient? Massive Parallelism
#3The side-to-side comparison is not very accurate.
The brain consists of many structures, many of them involved in non-cognitive tasks.
Re: Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient? Massive Parallelism
#4The brain definitely has an edge on compute power. The computer has an edge on storage power. I would bet the brain doesn’t store more than a Terabyte of information.
We just need more cores without spiking energy usage.
Re: Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient? Massive Parallelism
#5"a professional tennis player can follow the trajectory of a tennis ball after it is served at a speed as high as 160 miles per hour"
This is false or at least highly misleading. A reader might imagine that the player's eyes track the ball in flight. This is not what happens. A pro player reads the position of the serve and begins moving before the ball is hit. The predictive power of the brain is much more important than the speed and precision the author was trying to highlight here.
Re: Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient? Massive Parallelism
#6[deleted]
Re: Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient? Massive Parallelism
#7How many milliseconds does it take for one layer of neurons to adjust its output? Let's call this number X.
Can we conclude that if a task takes a human Y milliseconds, then a neural network with Y/X layers is sufficient for that task?
Re: Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient? Massive Parallelism
#8How many milliseconds does it take for one layer of neurons to adjust its output? Let's call this number X. Can we conclude that if a task takes a human Y milliseconds, then a neural network with Y/X layers is sufficient for that task?
AIUI/AIBT there aren't really discrete layers in brains and even the same type of neuron can act in very different ways, so I wouldn't be surprised if this question doesn't translate to brains.
Re: Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient? Massive Parallelism
#9The side-to-side comparison is not very accurate. The brain consists of many structures, many of them involved in non-cognitive tasks.
The "speed of basic operation" column is given as "10 GHz" for a computer and 1 kHz for a human brain, but later is clarified that the 1 kHz refers to the maximum observed frequency of a neuron's output. Arguably these are unrelated metrics. I don't think a thing like "speed of basic operation" can even be defined for a human brain, because fundamentally it's a programmable computer metric that simply doesn't transfer to a brain.
Of course, one could go ahead and simply compare the conscious compute power of a human to that of a computer (e.g. FLOPS), but then that number would be something like "1/100 to 5 FLOPS".
Re: Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient? Massive Parallelism
#10The brain definitely has an edge on compute power. The computer has an edge on storage power. I would bet the brain doesn’t store more than a Terabyte of information. We just need more cores without spiking energy usage.
Interesting observation. I think most of us rely on some sort of world view or paradigm to operate. Probably as a result, the actual info stored is even less than a TB.