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IBM Working on Brain-Rivaling Computer
Obdurate writes "The first supercomputers to approach and even surpass the processing power
of the human brain are to be built by IBM, under a $184M contract
announced by the US Government yesterday.
ASCI Purple and Blue Gene/L will be the fastest and most powerful machines built,
with a combined capacity equal to the 500 best of todays computers."
It's difficult to estimate, because the human brain is incredibly fast at some things (recognizing a face/voice, processing multiple sounds/images simultaneously, etc...) that would take a computer much longer to do, but on the other hand, it's rather slow at performing specific calculations (How long does it take you to add 100 integers together?).
t 101100.htm i ew_article/rs=yes/go.html
Even so, the human brain is rated somewhere at millions of gigaflops. Quite interesting. Here are some articles (google for some more):
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/speeches/j
http://zinos.com/cool/zinos/scan/se=AR002649/sp=v
# fuser -v
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I once had an exercise in a business math class where half had calculators and the other had nothing. Calculator users *had* to use the calculator. The teacher then asked simple arithmetic questions - 2x2, 3 minus 1, etc. Of course, the people without calculators could answer first.
That shows that our fingers are slower than our brains. No surprise there.
The fastest computer in the world will always be limited to how quickly data may be fed to it. One way or another, a human will have to direct this operation - if only for safety and security considerations.
That's just silly. Computers can already prcess data much faster than you or I (or you and I) can follow.
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/11/19/ 021119hnasicpurple.xml
Feast upon my linkage!
That's about $330 Million not $184 Million depending on exchange. The article says it's £184 Million which is considerably more.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
SkyNet not Skylab. Skylab fell back to earth in 1979.
Trolling is a art,
£184 million, not $184 million.
Actually, the reason for Blue Gene is the following:
The life science division of IBM was looking at doing protein folding, and calculations showed that you'd need a 1 Teraflop computer running for a year to fold an average protein (about the same as doing it in the web lab).
So they're building it now and Blue Gene/L is the first version of that computer.
I'm sorry, but this is hogwash. Our brains are not amazing because of their computational power, but because of human intuition.
What, praytell, can "human intuition" possibly be other than the result of the brain taking information and acting on it? The analogy between a computer and a human brain has all sorts of problems.
Nevertheless, there is no such thing as "human intuition". Brains are made of neurons. Chemical and electrical signaling between the neurons is the only thing that causes anything to happen in our brains. There is no humonculus controlling anything. There is no random number generator. Human intuition may be described, IMHO, as logical extrapolations based on imperfect knowledge. It is not some mystical, non-computational characteristic of neurology.
The entire concept that we can match up a machine's computation to the brain's is trivializing how the brain functions.
The brain is relatively simply at a basic level. Chemicals and electric signals are exchanged by various neurons. This represents the exchange of information, some meaningful, some not, some we just don't know about. Certain regions of the brain are responsible for processing visual data (much of the "conscious" brain could be viewed as a massive extension of the eye).
We break down each function related to the problem and track it to the subsystem, breaking everything down into smaller and smaller and more discrete processes, and it all begins to look very much like simple computational problems. We're used to dealing with digital computers and our analysis of how to solve problems with digital computers is certainly not applicable to the brain on a one-to-one basis -- that is just nuts.
The short reply to your assertion is, however, that the only way we will ever understand the functioning of the "brain" and the rest of the related nervous system is to break it down into little parts, i.e. trivialize it.
I was able to catch a football before I even studied mathematics, let alone arithmetic. There is no calculus problem being solved.
But I'll bet that you didn't learn how to catch a ball without getting stoved fingers, missing a bunch of them, dropping balls on occasion from mis-judging speed, height, the position of your body, etc.
Memory, experience, and the brain's wonderful ability to track moving things (likely a residual survival skill) easily do this without requiring conscious thought on your part.
The fact that you are unaware of the process and the calculations being made does not mean that they are not being made. Are you aware of the temperature calculations for when you bump the stove? ("I wonder how hot this is...hmmm...it feels as though it might cause third degree burns in 1.2 seconds...oh...it has already been 3.2 seconds...I'd better remove my hand.") Much is going on "behind the curtain". Consciousness appears to be related to only a very little of what we do on a regular basis.
guac-foo
Lots of petrified grits
This move is a direct response to the Japanese Earth Simulation project--a vector parallel supercomputer that scores an impressive 35 sustained teraflops in the LINPACK test. This behemoth is over 2 times faster than ASCI WHITE and ASCI Q COMBINED. (the fastest two supercomputers the US currently has) The DOE and DOD are feeling pretty insecure about not having the "world's smartest" title under their belts and figure this is a practical way of gaining it back. Tax dollars at work, I hope in 2004 that those advertised teraflop numbers are somewhere in the ballpark of reality.