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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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!!!!
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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.
>
> 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.