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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?
How often does it think about sex?
In fact he's a bit thick.
Now we can have computers that screw things up at a rate that rivals our own! Because seriously, we needed the competition.
Actually, that won't be that difficult to do if they are comparing this computer with the "brain power" some of the doe-doe's I went to high school with
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
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.
there's variability in human brains. I wonder whose brain it will rival. We don't need to spend $100,000,000,000 to wind up with an electronic version of Pat Robertson or Rush Limbaugh.
Perhaps now we will get the Answer to Life, Universe, Everything!
And it damn better not be 42!
Join the elite! Post at score:2! Ghostwheel is online.
The human brain does more than simple processing. Think about it, the ability to do calculations, etc., is tied into the most ancient (reptilian) part of the brain.
Now, if they could make a computer that could experience emotions (or could explain what women really want :-)), that would be a true accomplishment.
Thou Shalt Not Make a Machine in the image of the mind of Man.
Somehow, I think that might be good advice.
The processing power of a honeybee's brain in terms of the power needed for it to perform flight as it does, and find honey, and return to the hive, etc., has been estimated at 60 teraflops. The idea that 6 times as much processing power = the human brain seems reasonably foolish. I think ultimately, the problem is that people tend to think of brains as giant calculating machines, when they're not -- there's a great deal of hardwired logic controlling things like breathing and reflexes, that aren't so much mediated by calculation, as they are by simple input output "black-box" sort of processes. This is another reason attempting to equate a brain to a giant computer seems foolish.
Kargis Strong, MD
I think I read somewhere that brain fires bursts of neurotransmitters in the range of 40 Hz. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, you're conciousness is running on a processor that's slower than the chip in your GBA or your Palm Pilot.
I think that what most people don't get is that the brain is not that powerful a computer... It's just very, very good at what it's supposed to do.
Think of it this way. Instead of a computer and mobo combination, consider the brain as dozens and dozens of embedded micro-controllers that talk to eachother via a protocol. Each one is very specific. We have one that handles getting audio signals, one that handles getting video signals... and then completely different controllers for recognizing voice, music, speech, text, and images. There is one overlying controller-- the frontal lobe-- but most of what is does is pattern matching and random number generation. It's the combination or all these working together, not the raw ability of the brain to process information, that makes the magic of 'conciousness'.
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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.
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.
It's not anything remotely like a human brain. They're making some rough analogy between storage size, processing speed, and the number and nature of neurons in the human skull. This is just a really really really fast/big version of existing machines.
Again, for those who haven't read Douglas Hofstadter's excellent books GEB and MMT - being human-like is a *really* tough thing for a computer, and we haven't even begun to figure out the basics of it on paper. Maybe in 100 years we'll understand the problem better, but I'll place my bets now that when we do we'll finally realize it's futile to try to mimic it.
11*43+456^2
Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14am.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
ASCI Purple
I can't wait until a few years from now when we're treated to talking about ASCI Mauve, ASCI Burnt Sienna, and ASCI Periwinkle....
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
Are we talking about the brain as we use it, or the brain, at it's full potential?
I don't think IBM know... Seems like some silly marketing ploy like Intel's "The Pentium III makes Internet faster".
I mean... Does even anyone know how quick the brain is at it's "full potential"? Do we even have a unit in which we measure brain "quickness"? I don't think brains go well with FLOP's. As someone in another thread said: "with easy numbers I can do 1 - 2 FLOP's". Still, we can do stuff we haven't even come close to with today's technology.
I wonder if there's a science that research the possibilities to adapt human behavior and thinking to computers? That's usually the major flaw with today's robots, etc. We have pretty much unimaginable power in the super computers of today, but the computer "minds" we've produced so far are still at a laughable stone age level. Why? Do we *still* need more power to make a computer be able to follow a natural conversation (without pre-made replies)? Or do we simply not have the theory to approach the problem and we're essentially just standing there saying "duh?" at the problem of having a computer to truly *know* grammatics and form sentences on its own?
Sure, we have neural networks, and that might be a nice *foundation* for simulating human minds, but how to do it in practice? How to write the actual code? Again, are there even a science for this?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
While the human brain is usually not very good at such linear calculations, hence the popularity of a calculator, its true power lies in it's massively parallel processing.
/. expression, the brain functions very similar to a beowolf cluster. We can design computers (very expensive ones, though) that can simulate many of the simpler activities that humans are capable of (such as complex pattern recognition, primitive conversation skills, and rule-based systems of cause and effect,) but to do all of these at once is still well on the horizion.
To tie in an ever popular
-Space for rent
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!
The Raw processing power of the brain is very high, but its actual effectiveness and speed is crap. The reason is the IO speeds, the network interface (spine) has poor throughput and requires lots of individual channels rather than being able to operate as a simple bus, this means loads of wasted space when a channel isn't doing anything.
/dev/random would be pretty useless, and yet the software in humans means that this is a greatest advantage.
The external interfaces are even worse, these make the brain totally useless for many tasks that computers can process in seconds. As an example try raytracing a rendering a scene using crayons and doing the maths in your head.
So the human brain totally and utterly is secondary to the computer already.
Apart from the fact that humans can be inspired. The solution may take a computer 100 years to attack by brute force and it will get there... but a smart person will do it in minutes because "its obvious".
Computers already outstrip us in terms of processing, but while they are just grown up calculators they miss the essence of human processing. A computer hardwired to mutate everything via
It will be generations before computers will have reached a stage they can start doing the obvious. The limited processing of the brain has produced the people on the Jerry Springer show and Isaac Newton, it ain't the hardware, its the software that counts.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
So a computer with the processing capacity of a human brain is to be put to work by the government? Does the US government have any actual experience in managing something as powerful as a human brain? How long before the computer realizes it could do much better in the private sector?
Lots of interesting things about this:
First, the real issue is not hardware or CPU cycles -- it is software. Tired of Seti@home? Let's build a distributed processing network that has as many CPU cycle equivalents as the human brain! Oh yeah, that's already been done. Ok, so why doesn't it "think" yet? Oh yeah...software.
The issue is how to integrate storage, processing, "RAM", etc. into a software package that can emulate a human brain's method of thinking (which may be a very bad, krufty method of developing consciousness -- why would anyone use meat for processors? What a kludgy hack!).
(OT: what if "thinking" software is _not_ GPL'ed? That could be really frightening. So could security issues for "thinking" machines.)
Second, the next issue is why should we compare digital thinking machines to biological ones? Maybe it is the only benchmark we can think of, but given the truly awkward way in which light-sensitive cells were adapted for inclusion a biological thinking machine (see Francis Crick's "Astonishing Hypothesis"), why can't a much more efficient independent decision making machine be developed from digital equipment (not DEC, btw) actually designed for the purpose?
The human brain/computer comparison is really a red herring. The only reason to create a human-like digital thinking machine/emulator (and you thought WINE was hard to use...) might be to pursue immortality. I think the more likely reason is that it would be the ultimate species-wide circle jerk. Humanity getting off on creating humanity. Bleh. Let's set our sights a little higher.
guac-foo
Lots of petrified grits
..contract announced by the US Government yesterday. This computer will be delivered just in time for the national debates of the 2004 election, subbing in for George Bush.
Live web cams
Dear IBM,
I couldn't help but notice that you were hard at work developing a computer to rival the human brain to the tune of $184,000,000.
It just so happens that I have a human brain and I would be quite happy to let you use it for a tidy sum that is far below the aformentioned $184M.
Please give me a call at your earliest convenience to work out the details.
Thanks,
Jason
----[%snip]----
My
Limekiller
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.
We can make mechanical hearts so the tin man is taken care of. All that's left is to give the cowardly lion a lot of booze and suddenly Dorothy is off to see the wizard by herself.
--Joey
Imagine a bewul... --sssllllaaaaappppp!!!!
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
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.
Look at it this way. Go outside, on a windy day (adding more variables to the mix) and have someone throw you a football/basketball/baseball/frisbee/whatever. It probably takes 3-4 seconds at most for the ball to reach you, and looooong before that, your brain completed a monstrous calculus problem. It figured in the position of the thrower, the wind velocity and direction, direction/speed of the ball, the ball's arc of travel, and in the next split second, sent signals to your legs and feet to move your body to the ball's expected landing spot.
But wait, it's the ball's landing spot minus about five feet, because your brain figures you want to be positioned to catch the ball when it's about 4-5 feet off the ground. It simultaneously sends signals to your hands and arms, positioning them to catch the ball, taking into account the ball's speed, size and mass.
A lot of calculations in an extremely short period of time! And, if you think that's impressive for a human brain, the brain in that dumb mutt of yours in the back yard can do the same thing when you toss him a tennis ball.
ASCI Purple will be built using 12,544 IBM Power5 microprocessors, the same chips that are used in Apple PCs and Nintendo games systems.
Umm, how about...NOT. Just because they're all PowerPC based doesn't make them the same. Based on that logic a 386 and a Pentium 4 are the same too, just beacuse they're both built on the x86 architecture.
Power 5 (can't find a link) is a generation of chips that are related, but further on the horizon than the chips Apple is buying (both are Power 4 spin-offs, but quite different). The chips used in the Nintendo GameCube are not even related -- they just happen to also be made by IBM -- not to mention they are several years old while the above chips are not even available yet.
Then again having a server class chip in a Nintendo might be interesting...
Yes, but how many BP does it take to process one LOC (Library Of Congress) of data?
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Digital computers and the human brain work on completely different computational principles. The people who run these meaningless calculations on the "processing power of the brain" take each synapse to be a bit. That's absolute bunk when you're talking about the nonlinear properties of even small networks of neurons, much less the massively complex architecture of the brain. Until we actually develop an understanding of how neural networks (real neural networks, not the stuff that drives touchpads) operate, we can't even begin to make realistic comparisons.
btw, I'm a ee who does neuroscience research, so I'm not talking out of my ass here.
Some men spend their entire lives trying to kill themselves for having been born. --Ross MacDonald
£184 million, not $184 million.
---Our brain is the ultimate laptop.
I beg your pardon... My girlfriend is my "ultimate laptop". heh heh..
What operating system will this thing use? The linked article didn't say, except for something about "autonomic" self-diagnosing and repair, which is intriguing as well.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
I hate Grammar Nazi's
ASCI White, Deep Blue(understandable), but now
:) )
ASCI Purple and Blue Gene/L ? WTF?
Is the next version going to be called
ASCI Pink and Purple? or ASCI Barbie's Dreamhouse.....
Get back to naming the systems after Tolkien characters, or greek gods. (
Skynet will rule the human race, sure enough, but it won't be called "Skynet". It will be known as
ASCI SuperPoopyPants.
nbfn
No, and no.
It's only got the power of one human brain.
First, that means it's too stupid to telecommute, and probably prefers to sit in traffic for an hour or two each day in a busy-wait.
Second, on the ability to do its own taxes, it's up against over 500 lawyers masquerading public servants on Capitol Hill who are drafting laws to make the tax code even more incomprehensible.
Even if we assume a generous lawyer-to-human intelligence ratio, it's still outgunned at least ten-to-one.
>
>I might have an opportunity to meet Marilyn Vos Savant next month at the annual Parade Publications holliday party... I'll be sure and ask her the outcome of a 14 megaton detonation if it were to occur on the corner of 47th and Lex at about the 25th story level. I'll get back to you on that
The difference between theoretical and experimental science, in a nutshell.
A theoretical physicsist knows that the simplest way to get the answer is to just ask Marilyn Vos Savant, wait a few moments while she derives the equations for the 14MT blast at the desired altitude from first principles, and then punches it into Blast Mapper to demonstrate that indeed, her answer of "well, it'll suck more than the 1MT blast, and less than the 25MT blast" is within the paramaeters of the open literature.
An experimental physicist, on the other hand, will find out - and will do so much more quickly than the theoretician - simply by asking Anna Nicole Smith by means of a telephone call placed from at least 20 miles away, and observe the results as Anna's head explodes during her brain's attempted parsing of the question. (Predicted criticality point: somewhere between the words "outcome" and "of").
>
> Considering we can blow up the surface of the world a couple of times(at least) over with our existing stockpiles, why are we spending ANY money on ANYTHING except REDUCING said stockpiles?
It's you :-)
Seriously - reducing the need for large nuclear stockpiles exactly why the money's being spent on simulations.
Nukes are complicated devices, composed of weird stuff (the fissionables and other what-not), and normal stuff (the explosives that trigger the weird stuff).
Over time, the weird stuff changes its properties. So does the normal stuff.
One of many issues with nukes is that if you're gonna throw one at someone, you want to be damn sure it goes off. Otherwise, you've probably just given your enemy enough weird stuff that they could build their own bomb. This, I think we can agree, is a Bad Thing.
If you're going after a guy in a hardened bunker, and your nuke blows up but doesn't blow as strongly you thought it would, you may have to lob another one at the same target. And that means you need to have more nukes in reserve.
And worse yet, if you're going after the same bunker, but your nuke works a little too well, you've just wiped out a city instead of just the few hundred feet around your target. This is inefficient at best, and barbarism at worst. (The early fusion bombs had this "problem", and some tests resulted in radiation exposures far greater than was expected, mainly because the bomb was "better" than it was supposed to be.)
If you want to cut down on the number of nukes in the arsenal, a good way is to make sure that you've got a few very good ones that always go off when they're supposed to, with the correct amount of "boom".
One way to make damn sure your nukes blow up when and how big they're supposed to is to test them regularly. I'll grant that mushroom clouds over the Nevada desert were probably very pretty to watch, but they were also pretty messy for those living downwind. Bad idea.
The second way is underground testing, which solves most of the "downwind" problem, but can still result in some leakage under some circumstances.
That really only leaves one other option - to run simulations. Lots of simulations. Using the best math your scientists can come up with, and the fastest computers your geeks can build. No radiation leaks, and what you learn while building the supercomputers can be used for building higher-performance computers for peaceful purposes in the future.
I dunno about you, but I'll take Door Number Three any day.
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.
Yes, the power of the human brain = 1 BP (brainpower).
But that's the American system. The rest of the world uses Metric, and not even NASA can remember the conversion ratio. I seem to remember something about subtracting 32, but it's getting foggy.
Shouldn't Joel Robinson be the director of this project? I mean, the guy made at least three AIs out of parts meant to stop and start movies! Mike was barely able to keep them functioning after Joel escaped.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
But is the brain calculating this or rather looking up the answer? I know as a toddler I couldn't catch squat, but as I got older I got better. Was the reason increased proceesing power, my brain got bigger. Or more experience, I'd caught a lot more balls by then.
I doubt very much the brain is clunking through calculus.
Sure it is. What do you think "more experience" means? It means that the neurons in your brain have reconnected in ways to tackle a task better each time. It doesn't necessarily mean your brain did it one way or another. Let's look at the two ways that a wetware computer could catch the ball:
A) Mathematics. [Input: (Here is the ball now. And here is where it is now. And this is roughtly how fast the wind is blowing and what direction it is coming from...) -> Process (Compare position of the ball at time A to that of time B, then to time C, the path is making an arc... Extrapolate that arc. Where will the ball be at time D? -> Output (Move those hands and catch!)]. That doesn't necessarily mean you used more neurons (your "bigger brain") to do it. It's like taking a chunk of mixed silicon and metal and turning it one step at a time into a 3GHz custom CPU. Reorganization made for faster processing.
B) Look up tables. Keep a log of past experiences, the solution to each experience and reference it each time a task is done. Certain things your brain probably only uses a lookup table for -- digit - by - digit multiplication for example. The brain recognizes a Platonistic "football-ish" object and throws it into the works. It thinks, what did I do the last time I had a football pitched it right at my noggin?
But you can't tell me that the circumstances are the same every time someone throws you the ball. If your brain was simply trying to catch by following previous experiences, it would fail to find a previous experience when the wind suddenly shifts and blows hard. Or you trip over a rock, stumble and still make the catch. Or the ball travels at a different speed. Do you just stand there, or improvise? If your brain isn't doing any actual number crunching to catch that ball, did you only catch it the last time by chance? And just think of how much storage space would be needed to hold every experience! Quite the cluttered mess. It makes much more sense in this situation to reply more upon the math than it does look up tables.
So the last poster was right. A brain does do math to catch that ball. And you're right, a brain does reference previous experiences when trying to catch that ball.
Since this math is done by specialized brain functions that were prepared to do just that, and are inseperably integrated with other brain connections -- it doesn't mean that you could take that calculus ability and use it for another task. But the math is being done.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh