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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."
how do they measure the processing power of the human brain?
We will have such chips implanted into our brains in order to reason even quicker, then we will develop newer chip that will help design newer computers that will miniaturize themselves as new implants that will help us... :)
etc.
How far are we from learning kung fu from an optical disk ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Are we talking about the brain as we use it, or the brain, at it's full potential?
They're the same thing. The brain used the way we use it is the brain.
The idea of a brain that could do a lot more than we ever used it for, by very simple means, is an evolutionary impossibility - it could never have evolved. The idea is absurd.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Truth is stranger than fiction.
I nf oMarijuanaUse-ADHD-DrS.html
SPEC brain scans are actually quite commonly usely used to understand brain activity. Here's a study that shows how it's used:
http://neuro-www.mgh.harvard.edu/forum_2/ADHDF/
Anyone else notice that? Power4 is the current generation, and holds the 9th spot on the top-500 list with only 1280 processors!
I'm sure IBM is working hard on a new interconnect for this beast. Anyone know about the next-generation SP switch?
The press release also mentions that Purple will consist of "196 seperate computers" -- which works out to 64-processors per computer. Way to go IBM: the current Power4 systems are only to 32-way!
its called the child playing wall ball syndome
Although the "rated" processor cycle of a human brain may be measured in Hz... the overall number-crunching and algorithm pattern matching power of 4 billion years of refinement utterly out-class any computer well be making for years to come.
Case in point.. A child playing wall ball makes more physics calculations in one minute of game than a whole team of physicists could map out in months.... he calculates his own mass, his own speed, the angles and exact acceleration of his arms, the weight and distribution of balence between his feet, all while tracking the movements and possible movements of a ball with its own mass and porportions and an opponent. We could count layers upon layers of others things this kid is doing without thought, breathing, processing and responding to components inside his body such as adreneline, and a host of other things... but what it really comes down to is a child's Brain subconsciously is far more powerfull than any comp on the planet.
The comparison of raw number crunching super-clusters to a human who is nearly autonomus, learns independantly and can adapt to many situations in the blink of an eye (where a comp would take considerable reprogramming to adjust to new tasks) is falacy at best.
It has been predicted that AI will reach the emotional awareness of a teenager around 2050
--Enter The Sig
--
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
You underestimate your abilities by far - ever seen robots playing soccer? To hit a slowly rolling ball needs several MFLOPS, and every 2-year-old can easily do this. If you compare the the abilities of the robots to those of the average soccer player, you will see how easily the human brain can outperform a computer. On the other hand: Every time I listen to the interviews after a soccer match, I doubt if the statement above is true.
Neurons in adults: 2x10E9 to 5x10E9
Synapses in adults: 10E14, a few thousand per neuron
Neuron firings per second: max 2 Khz
The biggest challenge in comparing brain to supercomputer is the massive connectivity of brain, with 2000-5000 synapses per neuron.
The total processing speed of ASCII Purple sounds about right for number of neurons in brain times the maximum number of pulses per second per neuron.
Given there are 10E14 synapses, each one with at least a byte of synpatic weight associated with it, it would need memory of at least around a petabyte of memory, although synpase memory change speeds are probably not faster than tape, and I know of plenty of installations with a petabyte on tape.
But here is the kicker: Will those 100 teraflops be flops that can use thousands of inputs? Probably not. So I'd argue that to truly be as powerful as the human brain, you would need 100 petaflops of 1-2 input flops, with at least a petabyte tape system.
Hold on there!
Our brains are fine for huge linear calculations. Better than most calculators in fact.
Autistic savants....
Rain Main. That kind of thing.
There was a kid I knew in high school that could find cube roots for eight digit numbers nearly instantly but he couldn't recognize his brother's face in a picture.
My personal theory is this: Human brains are like a computer (about a million orders of mangitude more complex though). Most people have that all tied up in hardware dedicated to things like jobs, girl friends, football etc. etc.
John, my autistic friend in high school, hadn't dedicated the hardware to anything in particular, but he still had it available. He was lacking in a lot of things, but sheer processing power and memory he had in spades.
As a side story, another friend of mine in high school had epilepsy, and it kept getting worse. He eventually had brain surgery where they severed his corpus callosum. After that, he couldn't add single digit numbers if he closed his right eye. If he closed his left, he couldn't recognize faces. Just kind of shows how the brain works as a parallel system.