> "Humans are quite stupid in many ways, compared to computers. Let's start with the most obvious: they can't count. Ask a human to raise 3425 to the power of 5

> "Humans are quite stupid in many ways, compared to computers. Let's start with the most obvious: they can't count. Ask a human to raise 3425 to the power of 542 and watch them sit there for hours trying to work it out. Ridiculous" I hope this guy is just trolling, but in case he is not, this is a tired argument that should be debunked once and for all. The brain in the course of seemingly mundane activities (interpreting what we see, for instance) effectively performs a stupendous amount of complex calculations per second [1] What people confuse is conscious calculations vs effective calculations.[2] The brain does not need to output intermediate results of basic operations because that is not it's computational objective. I was actually a bit disappointed at the shallowness of the article; from the title I was expecting maybe a discussion of how complex even the very concept of intelligence is, and how speed of calculations does not necessarily equate to intelligence. [1] http://gizmodo.com/an-83-000-processor-supercomputer-only-matched-one-perc-1045026757 http://gizmodo.com/an-83-000-processor-supercomputer-only-ma... [2] http://chrisfwestbury.blogspot.com/2014/06/on-processing-speed-of-human-brain.html http://chrisfwestbury.blogspot.com/2014/06/on-processing-spe...